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Snowing old hags and Christmas traditions | ||
Tags: Traditions | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Cultural Experiences in Foreign Languages |  | |
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5145 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes  Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 1 of 11 23 December 2011 at 8:14am | IP Logged | ||
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Most of you have heard about how the people in Greenland have 17 different words for snow. I have heard it is just a myth, but all peoples who have close contact with snow will naturally have more words for it. One of our popular expressions is "Det snør gamle kjerringer", "It is snowing old hags". That one is used when it is snowing particularly heavy, with big snowflakes, and I was subjected to it last week. I was out driving, and it was snowing with absolutely huge snowflakes. It felt like it was snowing full blown snow balls, they were so big.
With the stress of the pre Christmas preparations, that of course was not very practical. I do not know what Christmas is like in your countries, but in Norway it is heart attack inducing - at least for the mothers. A good Norwegian mother should as part of her preparations do the following: - Clean the house from top to bottom - Send Christmas cards to friends and family (I used to be at the level of 100 private ones and 100 job related ones). These should of course preferably be hand written with a personal touch to each person and with a picture of the family. - Make 7 different sorts of Christmas cookies from scratch. - Make a Christmas callendar (one gift for each child from the 1st to the 24th of December). Luckily, I have just two kids, but finding 48 presents which should not cost more than a dollar or two, and which is still worth having is challenging - and then you have the wrapping of all 48 presents... - Attend Christmas functions of all your kid's activities (dancing, orchestra etc) - Go to Christmas parties with your friends and colleagues with large amounts of fat food and alcohol - Buy presents to the extended family - including the ex-husband of the half sister of the grandfather of your husband (so not kidding here - but he is a lovely guy in his 90ies, so I do not mind that one so much). I also get to buy the presents from everyone to everyone in my immediate family, including my own. (Though the last couple of years my kids have stepped up, so I actually get a surprise or two. - Decorating the house with all the traditional objects, some that I have picked up in Nasareth, some were made by my grandfather before the second world war, and some I have bought along the way. - Changing into Christmas curtains, Chrismas table cloths, Christmas cushions etc. - Buying lots of special food - Polish all the silver - Put up a "julenek" (sort of a heap of straws of grain, for the little birds) - Bake ginger bread with the kids - lots of fun, and lots of dough to scrape off the floor :-) - Making your own Christmas sweets from marzipan - one year I even made the marzipan from scratch - nevermore! The taste was great, but way too much work. - Getting and decorating the Christmas tree with lights, Norwegian flags, and all sorts of traditional or new trimmings. - Order flowers for all the older relatives, or other people you love - Making the traditional Christmas rice porridge on the 23. where you put an almond in it, and the one who gets the almond gets a marzipan pig (and inevitably the kid that gets the almond doesn't like marzipan, so we must get them chocolate instead... - Attend Christmas markets with the kids - Prepare Christmas dinner, which takes all the day of Christmas eve, as it includes porc rib, (which you start seasoning two days before), and which will sit in the oven for a few hours, fry Christmas saussage and meat balls, boil potatoes, prepare an extra special gravy from scratch, boil prunes, make home made sour kraut, boil apples in white wine, make the cranberry jam and get the Christmas soda, the Christmas beer and aquavita out. Then the dessert which is rice cream (leftovers from the rice porridge with whipped cream and served with a red sauce - strawberry or as we do - rose jelly. - Unwrap all the presents on the evening of the 24th, try to dispose of all the paper, and to find somewhere to put the new presents... - And then between Christmas and New year there are all the family parties. Some you just attend, some you have to prepare. I know it sounds like I am whining, and I should not be. I am happy that my family is in good health, and that we can afford buying Christmas presents and food. It is just that the shere work load is absolutely staggering, and I get no sympathy from my husband, who would have preferred just stikking a frozen pizza in the oven on Christmas eve and be done with it. So what are your Christmas traditions like, and do you have any weird expressions regarding snow? 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
 Fasulye Heptaglot Winner TAC 2012 Moderator Germany fasulyespolyglotblog Joined 5658 days ago 5460 posts - 6006 votes 1 sounds Speaks: German*, DutchC1, EnglishB2, French, Italian, Spanish, Esperanto Studies: Latin, Danish, Norwegian, Turkish Personal Language Map | Message 2 of 11 23 December 2011 at 8:51am | IP Logged | ||
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Oh, what a stressful Christmas, Solfrid Cristina! What am I lucky that I am not in your situation!
I will celebrate Christmas with my close friends and I have only got an "Adventskranz" with four golden candles - no Christmas tree. On 24 December we will play and sing Christmas carols in German and Dutch - and I will sing one in Danish! :) In the afternoon we will have - according to the German tradition - a "Bescherung", so we will give each other presents. We will cook Italian meals together - you can see which in Fasulye's Cooking log - just normal healthy food, not traditional Christmas food. And on 24 December in the eveing we will go for a walk around the block - to look at the beautiful Christmas decorations of other people's houses. Christmas will not be stressful at all for me - and it will be without snow according to the weather predictions for Germany. Fasulye Edited by Fasulye on 23 December 2011 at 8:53am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6514 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 3 of 11 23 December 2011 at 11:06am | IP Logged | ||
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To Solfrid Cristin: Next year let your husband do the preparations while you read Italian novels. Then you will of course 'just' have pizza, but you will be relaxed and happy.
Personally I don't do Christmas preparations if I can avoid it. Several years ago my sister and I got a craze about making Danish Christmas hearts, and we made those two years in a row, which resulted in so many hearts that they can fill my mothers sitting room twice (and more than that if necessary). So now we don't have to make more of those. My mother and sister have Christmas trees - I don't. I have bought one package to my mother, while my sister has bought her own gift, and I just have to refund the money for one USB stick ... oh no, there I blew the secret! And we eat slightly more nuts and chocolate and liquorice and other unhealthy goodies, but given that it can be bought all year round (and with pixies and Father Xmas from around mid November) this doesn't really constitute a Christmas tradition - it's just a common habit with seasonal fluctuations. 
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| Hampie Diglot Senior Member Sweden Joined 6470 days ago 625 posts - 1009 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: Latin, German, Mandarin | Message 4 of 11 23 December 2011 at 11:12am | IP Logged | ||
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Snö, blötsnö, nysnö, pudersnö, kramsnö, skare, modd, slask: eight words in Swedish that I can come up with right
away for snow. Though there’s not a lot of it around now, the grounds are mostly bare. Swedish Christmas, I guess, is in it’s ideal form very much alike Solfrid’s description. I’m also pretty sure they drink Julmust over there, haha. Though, since all old people eventually died, we’ll be only three this time. It’s the 24th that is the main day in Sweden, not the 25th, the latter is a day of sleeping and eating left-overs. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5822 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 5 of 11 23 December 2011 at 12:16pm | IP Logged | ||
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I once found an article on the net by a linguist on the "words for snow" thing, where he blew the theory to smithereens, talked about agglutinating languages, then calculated home many "words" he could make around the basic snow root given that the Eskimo-Aleut languages are agglutinative, and the number was so big he had to write it as an exponential or in scientific notation. I'm hunting on Google, but I can't find the article right now....
Anyway, Scotland lacks much by way of Christmas traditions -- protestantism was quite strict, and for a long time Christmas wasn't even a holiday here.... 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6514 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 6 of 11 23 December 2011 at 12:41pm | IP Logged | ||
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Danish:
Sne nysne (newly fallen snow) puddersne (powdery snow - good for skiing) tøsne (snow which is melting) frostsne (snow which isn't melting) slud (very wet snow - sleet) sneslud (the same with more snow) rim (thin layers of ice chrystal) Other uses of "sne": at sne: to snow sne: another word for cocaine Expression: "det er her det sner" (it is here it snows),- a corruption of "det er her det sker" (it is here it happens) And finally a discussion (in Danish) about the false claim that Greenlandic has a lot of words for snow - this article claims that fundamentally there only are two words for snow: falling snow is "qanik", og snow that already has fallen is "aput". Edited by Iversen on 23 December 2011 at 12:43pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6393 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 7 of 11 23 December 2011 at 1:02pm | IP Logged | ||
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LanguageLog has dozens of angry posts about the "words for snow" myth. It is even the origin for the word "snowclone". The only thing that gets the LanguageLog linguists frothing more at the mouth than mentioning the "Eskimo words for snow", are Strunk & White.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| hrhenry Octoglot Senior Member United States languagehopper.blogs Joined 4941 days ago 1871 posts - 3642 votes Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, ItalianC2, Norwegian, Catalan, Galician, Turkish, Portuguese Studies: Polish, Indonesian, Ojibwe | Message 8 of 11 23 December 2011 at 9:22pm | IP Logged | ||
It's funny you mention Christmas traditions. I was just trying to figure out a way to post something that was language-related. I didn't have any luck coming up with anything for languages, other than the one Christmas we all decided to go to Mexico. I was 14 and had just started my first year of Spanish, so I got to be among native speakers for those 10 days. I don't really have that many Christmas traditions, now that most of my family has passed on, but when all the family members were alive, we largely focused on heritage-type things - things our great grandparents brought over, then modified/Americanized over the years. I have some Norwegian background in my family, and Christmas was all about the cookies. Krumkake and Fattigmann were Christmas staples. And the fresh lefse - it never made it far from the stove and we all took turns tending to it, usually eating it before anyone else could. As for snow, I just wish we had more of it. There's not enough to even make a tiny snowman. Anyway... nostalgia. It's heightened during the holiday season for me. Cherish all that stress with your family. We rarely get enough time with them as it is. R. == 1 person has voted this message useful |
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