Christmas Eve is when my family has its biggest get together.
Pretty much everybody is there to eat a bunch of food, share a few presents and join in a very big and (mostly) holiday-themed singalong.
A lot of families here in the US have Christmas Eve parties a lot like ours.
Though in Iceland, today and tomorrow are a little different: they’re a lot more book-focused.
There’s a word in Icelandic for this phenomenon: Jólabókaflóð, “the Christmas flood of books.”
Iceland may not have a huge population, but the country is full of readers.
Its literary traditions go back to at least the sagas of the 12th Century, which helped preserve Icelandic culture even when the country was under external control.
In medieval times, farmers and their families would gather indoors in the hours before bed to handle a few chores while one of them read out loud.
This book-flood tradition has roots in World War II, when pretty much everything was rationed except paper and people got used to giving each other books since there weren’t many other options.
And since books can make pretty great gifts, the tradition stuck around even after the rations were lifted.
Preparations for this literary flood begin in the fall, when the members of Iceland’s Publishing Association release a big catalog of upcoming book releases.
They send a copy to every house in the country.
From there, participants can let each other know which books they’d like, which they can give and/or get on Christmas Eve and then spend all Christmas Day reading, maybe while drinking a mug of hot chocolate or a cocktail of fizzy orange soda and brown ale known as Jólabland.
And because there’s something like five new titles for every thousand Icelanders, there’s a nice big range of options: traditional works, genre fiction, poetry, pretty much whatever you’d like.
A couple years ago one of the hit holiday reads was a visual tour of Icelandic tractor history.
Read what you want to read, I always say.
Iceland may have a flood of books at Christmas, but New York City’s got a whole lot of unique Christmas trees.
Untapped New York recommends the origami tree at the American Museum of Natural History, a tree full of lobster traps in Brooklyn, and, at a renovation site, a tree filled with orange construction cones.
Why not fill one with Icelandic tractor books?
Jólabókaflóð: the Christmas flood of books (Iceland Air)
Alternatives to the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree in NYC (Untapped New York)
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