Nothing But Repeats These Days
I’m on my hols, so here’s some festive bits from the archive: some notes on reindeer; and some notes on the Gävle goat. Plus some links to new stuff.
It’s Christmas Eve Eve! (Actually as I write it is Christmas Eve Eve Eve, but let’s not over complicate things.) I am taking a breather: the first quarter of next year is going to be pretty stressful in a “what do you mean, you haven’t finished the book yet?” kind of way, so I’ve taken the liberty of a full fortnight off.
So: next week, it’s a borders-related thing you won’t have read before unless, for some reason, you felt the need to buy a copy of my book in Spanish (and even then you won’t have read it in English). This week, though, it’s some repeats, which you’re getting a day early because come on, who’s reading newsletters on Christmas Eve. Read to the bottom for some links to some new stuff, from myself or others. First up…
The Swedish town where every Christmas brings goat arson
This is actually from my 2021 book the The Compendium of (Not Quite) Everything, republished with a lovely new cover earlier this year, but someone posted it on Bluesky last week so I am shamelessly repromoting…
Julbocken/Joulupukki, the “Yule Goat”, is a Swedish tradition which seems to have its origins in the pagan tradition that thunder god Thor’s chariot was drawn across the sky by a pair of goats. Once upon a time, the goat was scary and demanded you give it presents; then it was nice and gave them out; now it’s basically just Santa, but mystifyingly named after a goat.
This is, I must say, one of my favourite Christmas traditions – partly because it’s just so, at least to my goat-free English eyes, bizarre, but mostly because there are so many different variations upon it. One Scandinavian Christmas tradition involves an annual visitation from a gift-giving goat. A second involves adorning your Christmas tree with goat-based ornaments, and a third involves constructing a giant version of the second out of straw and displaying it in the town centre.
A fourth, at least in one town, involves setting fire to the third, even though it is very definitely illegal.
Some background here. In 1966, Stig Gavlén, an advertising consultant living in the eastern Swedish city of Gävle, had the bright idea that what his town really needed was a massive straw goat. The first Gävle goat was 13 metres tall, seven metres long and weighed three tonnes. It stood proudly in Slottstorget – Castle Square – for the whole of December.
Then, on New Year’s Eve, someone burned it down.No matter: the festive season was nearly over, the goat was insured, and, anyway, these things happen if you build a giant goat made out of straw. So everyone chalked it up to experience, and a group of local businessmen agreed to sponsor next year’s goat.
All was fine for a couple of years, but then on New Year’s Eve 1969, someone burned the goat down again. In 1970, someone burned it down again – this time, instead of lasting for a month, it lasted a mere six hours. After that, the businessmen, a bit sick of seeing their goat go up in flames, pulled their sponsorship. But someone else took over, which was great, because it provided the thrilling opportunity for someone to smash the 1971 goat to pieces.
The 1972 one collapsed; the authorities suspected sabotage. In 1976, no suspicion was necessary, because someone literally drove into it.
In 1978, the goat was smashed to pieces again. In 1979, it was burned to the ground before even being assembled. A second goat was built, and, just to mix things up a bit, someone smashed it to pieces. Again.
To sum up the 1970s, not a single one of the giant Yule Goats constructed in the town of Gävle during that tumultuous decade survived the entire festive season. In 1981, for the first time in 12 years, the goat did survive, but if it was expecting its luck to have changed it was in for a nasty shock the following year when someone burned it to the ground again.
In 1985, the goat, for the first time listed in The Guinness Book of Records – 12.5 metres tall! – was protected by a two-metre-high metal fence, a private security firm, and a detachment from the local military. It still burned down in January.
In 1986, apparently regretting their exclusion from all the goat burning action, the local business group decided to build their own goat again. From this point on, each year, there are two goats. That means there are now twice as many goats to burn.
By 1988, the burning of the goat had become such a tradition that, thousands of miles away in England, local bookmakers were offering odds on when exactly the goat would burn. Disappointingly for gamblers, that year it survived, but the good people of Gävle made up for it the following year when, again, someone burned its components to the ground before they’d even been assembled into a goat. Public donations were collected to fund a replacement, which made it as far as January. Guess what happened next.
In 1992, a particularly good year for goat-burning, the two goats were burned down three times because one was rebuilt after the first burning. On 11 December 1998, the town was hit by a massive blizzard, and the volunteers guarding the goat headed for shelter on the assumption that you can’t burn a goat in a snowstorm. This assumption turned out to be wrong.
In 2001, a 51-year-old tourist from Cleveland, Ohio, served 18 days in prison after attempting to burn the goat down. His defence was that he didn’t realise it was illegal, he just thought it was a local tradition. After 35 years of this stuff, it’s easy to wonder if he perhaps had a point.
In 2005, two guys succeeded in burning the heavily guarded goat to the ground by shooting a flaming arrow at it. They escaped, because one was dressed as Santa Claus and the other as the Gingerbread Man.
By 2006, the authorities were storing their giant straw goat in a secret location. They needed a secret location for their giant straw goat.
The tradition continues to this day. In all, something like half the goats built in Gävle since 1966 have burned down, and barely one in three has survived the festive season unscathed.
There are two lessons here. One is that festive traditions are pretty mutable. The Gävle authorities think the tradition is erecting the giant Yule Goat. Everyone else thinks the tradition is trying to set fire to it. These traditions have co-existed, sort of, for over half a century.
The other lesson is that people really like setting fire to giant straw goats.
The article above is an extract from my book, The Compendium of (Not Quite) Everything, which still makes an excellent Christmas present. You can buy a copy here.
Hey, talking of festive quadrupeds...
Some Notes On Reindeer
From last Christmas.
So, don’t hate me for this, but I have eaten reindeer. Five years or so back I was invited on a press trip to Finland, and Agnes asked me to forward her the email, and suddenly we were both going on a press trip to Finland. (She was good at that sort of thing.) In the course of our lovely work trip/minibreak, I kept trying to wind her up by making extremely funny and charming jokes about Rudolph burgers and so on, until I came down for breakfast on the last day in the city of Tampare and discovered what the sausages were actually made of. They were okay. Bit gamey.
Anyway, some important facts about reindeer! They have a circumpolar distribution, which means exactly what it sounds like. They’re generally brown in summer and white in winter, which helps to keep them stealthy. They have special hollow fur, which helps to keep them warm. They vary wildly in size, with the largest subspecies, Osborne’s caribou (which is native to British Columbia), weighing in at 340kg, roughly four times as much as the smallest, the Svalbard reindeer (which is native to the eponymous Norwegian archipelago).
They’re the only species of deer in which females grow antlers for defence or social dominance purposes, although they often don’t because that’s a lot of effort. (Antlers are a pretty energy-intensive business.) The males, though, always grow them, to impress the females with their virility, vitality, and ability to waste energy on fripperies (see above), and although the antlers are clearly there so that they can fight for the best mates, they rarely actually do because it tends to be obvious who’d win. I originally wrote “this feels like a pretty good system”, but when I came to edit this I mentally transposed it to the algorithm on human dating apps and now I’m not so sure, so scratch that. Anyway: there’s a popular theory on the internet that all Santa’s reindeer are female because the males lose their antlers in winter, but when you consider that
The song specifically says “he”, and
These are magical reindeer that can fly
…then I think we can discount that sort of evidence.
What’s the difference between a reindeer and a caribou, you ask? Location, mostly: they’re the exact same animal. (Circumpolar distribution, remember.) We just call the European variants reindeer, and the American ones caribou – unless they’re domesticated, in which case we call them reindeer, too, probably for reasons related to Santa’s sleigh.
Reindeer are the only type of deer to have been successfully domesticated, something which has allowed Arctic people to use them as a source of clothing (through skins), shelter (same) and food (the rest of it). In Nordic countries, aside from sausages, you can also eat reindeer meat dried, salted or sauteed or even as canned meatballs. I probably shouldn’t have written this before lunch, I’m going to go weird passing any Christmas decorations now.
Anyway, enough of that, it’s time for the big question: what colour are their noses? Was Robert L. May, the illustrator and author who created Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer in a 1939 children’s book, really onto something?
Reindeer noses are generally in the white/brown sort of range, like the rest of the reindeer. Delightfully, though, it turns out they can actually be red, too. According to a 2012 report in the BMJ, density of nasal blood vessels – useful for regulating body temperature in the cold – can give some reindeer snouts a distinctly reddish hue. (More from Smithsonian magazine here.) Less festively, they can also suffer from cold-like symptoms due to, er, a nasal infestation of warble fly larvae, which once grown irritate the throat lining until the reindeer coughs them out to bother other members of the herd while the original hosts get on with their lives. Bet you’re wishing you hadn’t asked now.
So, yes, reindeer really can have red noses - although not round red noses like they’re in Comic Relief, more sort of pinkish snouts. Despite what movies may have told you, alas, they cannot fly.
Santa’s reindeer are named, of course, Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donner, Blitzen (all from the 1823 poem A Visit from St. Nicholas; authorship contested) and last, but not least, Rudolph.
Those are all the facts I have for you concerning reindeer at this time.
Some things to hear or read
1. I was on the panel for the last two Oh God, What Nows of 2025: the end of year special; and the 2025 politics awards.
2. There was also Friday’s Bunker with me and Alex VT which was basically a Paper Cuts in disguise.
3. If you’ve not had enough Christmassy stuff from me, here’s festive favourite, Every Dumb Thought I Have Ever Had About Christmas Songs. RIP Chris Rea, gone to the great A1(M) in the sky.
4. Here’s something on a related topic into which I put actual thought back in 2017: What are the Best Christmas Songs If You’re Depressed About the World?
And here are three things I read this year that I just really enjoyed.
5. Florida’s Brightline has been hailed as the future of high-speed rail in the United States. The only problem is - it keeps killing people. Fascinating piece by Katilyn Tiffany in the Atlantic. (Hattip: the brilliant photojournalist Dominic Gwinn.)
6. “If you have been following the beast on your socials, you might know that capybaras get hiccups; that they carry large oranges and yuzu on their heads; that they allow birds to eat the schmutz out of their fur, which brings them almost orgiastic levels of delight; that they try to help injured corgis escape from their protective cones; that they cuddle with monkeys and lick baby kangaroos; that a group of them adopted a cat named Oyen into their social group at a Japanese zoo....”
Very much enjoyed Gary Shteyngart’s New Yorker longread about capybaras.
7. And finally, Josh Dziez’s piece about Wikipedia, “a machine for turning conflict into bibliographies”, in The Verge is absolutely full of fascinating details. My favourite is that there was a 40,000 word debate about whether to capitalise the word “into” in the title of the film Star Trek Into Darkness.
Last but not least, I truly hope you and yours have a lovely Christmas. After this bloody year, you deserve it.
I think I’ll be laughing at ‘This assumption turned out to be wrong’ for days. Merry Christmas, Jonn.
A train going at a whole 125mph. Wow!