Content area
Full Text
Keeping Christmas: Yuletide Traditions in Norway and the New Land. By Kathleen Stokker. St Paul, MN: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2000. xxiii + 355 pp. B/W illus. $34.95 (hbk). ISBN 0-87351-389-4 (hbk), 0-87351-390-8 (pbk)
Kathleen Stokker is professor of Norwegian at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa. She has previously published the excellent scholarly book, Folklore Fights the Nazis. Humor in Occupied Norway, 1940-1945 (University of Wisconsin Press, 1995; see review in Folklore 1998), besides numerous articles on Scandinavian folklore.
The reason for studying Christmas traditions is well founded. Because of the way the Norwegian and the American Christmas celebrations met, "Christmas reveals better than any other aspect of Norwegian American culture the forces of evolution, preservation, and assimilation that faced the Norwegians as they made their new home on American soil. Certain Norwegian Christmas traditions remain not only the most stable folkways Norwegians brought to America, but also the ones through which the immigrants revealed their deepest feelings about adjusting to American culture" (p. xvi). The first part of the book (pp. 1-114) examines "the way present-day Norwegians celebrate Christmas from Advent through Epiphany" (p. xvi). Through her own fieldwork and observations, Stokker is able to throw new lights on present-day Norwegian Christmas traditions and to supplement Norwegian research.
The second part is devoted to Norwegian-American Christmas traditions compared with American traditions,...