The following blog entry has been republished here courtesy of Itching for Eestimaa.
Estonians have some pretty interesting culinary treats, including herring cooked every which way, sült (meat jelly), kartulisalat (always with diced ham), and tatrahelbed (a salted porridge).
But it is during Christmas time, or jõuluaeg, that they break out the really good stuff, starting with the ubiquitous blood sausage or verivorst. I have tasted this Estonian Christmas treat with mixed results. Sometimes it tastes so foul, I feel like I might as well just go to a field of cows, pick one, and stick a straw in its jugular. Other times it is loaded with barley, and when salted and covered in sour cream, it is palatable.
That’s why when it comes to Estonian Christmas food, I’ll be the one at the table loading up on pork, sauerkraut, and potatoes with plenty of kangesinep (strong mustard). The added benefit of the mustard is that it makes you thirsty, which means you have to drink more really alcoholic beer, which means you have a better time.
Estonians typically celebrate Christmas on Christmas eve. “Like in other Nordic states,” writes Estonia’s foreign ministry, “Estonia’s celebration of Christmas mostly falls on Christmas Eve, however, Christmas season starts from Advent with people buying Advent calendars or lighting Advent candles. Each year on December 24, the President of Estonia declares Christmas Peace, which is a 350-year-old tradition in Estonia.”
There is also the tradition of putting out candles for departed love ones, especially by visiting their graves and placing candles there. At Christmas, whole cemeteries are illuminated. It’s actually quite beautiful.
It’s hard to tell what is ancient custom in Estonia and what is borrowed from neighboring countries. According to the Estonian foreign ministry, an old custom was to bring Christmas straw into the house and to make Christmas crowns resembling church chandeliers, particularly in northern and western Estonia. More recently, you can see some incarnation of this tradition in St. Lucia processions.
Anyway, since Estonians don’t seem to mind borrowing traditions from their neighbors, one thing they should do is steal the tradition of Christmas beers from the Danes. Every year, Tuborg releases its special Julebryg Christmas beer, wishing you a “glaedelig jul” and plenty of drunken merriment. I don’t know how many of those I could drink. They are really good.
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Thank you for sharing your observations with us pertaining to the Estonian soul. Yes, isn’t it charming how the natives place those candles? “Actually quite beautiful”. Do sentences like that come naturally or by accident?
Late at night, we put bones through our noses and dance around the graves. You really should stay up later, it’s actually quite droll. And it has no deeper meaning for us at all, we just kind of do it out of compulsion, robot-like or in a kind of lobotoimized fashion.
The strong mustard is a Soviet legacy.
Black pudding is the best part of the meal, it just has to be prepared right (crispy), except for the black bread with fresh butter and the sauerkraut and the farm butter and the “free range” (hah) – as opposed to industrial pork, if you have friends with a farm of their own.
Actually, it is not at all that hard to determine what the ancient customs are. And for that matter how Estonians marked Christmas during the good twenties and thirties, before the somewhat disruptive Russian wave hit us and upset the apple cart for a few decades or possibly centuries to come.
The education is there to be had for the reading and the asking and the learning. It is all documented, ask around a little. Research a little, go in depth, don’t just write the first thing that comes to mind.