Scandinavian Aggression

För skratts skull: a sporadic category of short, self-contained humor writings that deal with topics too esoteric for actual humor websites.

Our Town’s Noble Christmas Tradition is to Construct an Enormous Lobster Effigy and Then Burn It to the Ground

The holiday season has always been one of my favorite times of the year. It’s just fun and festive and people tend to be in good spirits. The nights may be long, but the decorations are bright, and everyone is always in a cheerful mood. The carolers are caroling and the sleigh bells are jingling and ring-ting-tingling, too. Also, there’s an enormous effigy of a lobster on fire in the town square.

That’s because around here, it never really begins to feel a lot like Christmas till we’ve torched the gigantic Yule Lobster. There’s just something about the acrid smoke and ashes of a flaming 3-story tall lobster that gently drift down upon the surrounding rooftops that simply declares, “It’s the most wonderful time of the year!” It’s our own little, local tradition, and it goes way back to colonial times.

It all started when the town’s early inhabitants made small, straw lobsters to give to each other as presents in honor of the sea’s bounty that sustained them in those tough times. After years of this quaint gift-giving tradition, the town council eventually decided to designate public funds for the creation of a much larger straw lobster to be set up beside the town’s Christmas tree as another festive element to help spread the holiday cheer. As the legend goes, that first communal Yule Lobster was about 6 feet tall and lasted a day and a half before someone went and set it on fire.

And we’ve been doing it ever since. We really pride ourselves on keeping the tradition of destroying the Yule Lobster in an irrepressible conflagration alive today. The only exception to the tradition occurred back in the 60s when the lobster-burning Boomers in their youth managed to lasso the lobster and tow it to a massive pot of water where it was then ceremoniously boiled. But aside from that now-legendary year, we just always just set it on fire.

That’s not to say it’s always easy, though. In fact, there’s historically been a bit of friction between the town council and the town’s generations of lobster-obsessed pyromaniacs when it comes to the tradition. On the one hand, the town council doesn’t want us to burn the Yule Lobster down since they spend tax money on it and there’s all sorts of liability and insurance issues associated with it. On the other hand, all we want to do is raze it to the ground by any means necessary. We’ve been at an impasse on this matter for several hundred years now and neither side shows any signs of budging.

And just as the Yule Lobster has grown over the years to become the 3-story tall crustaceous monstrosity covered in garland, red ribbons, and Christmas lights that it is today, both sides have also evolved increasingly complex strategies to protect and destroy it. As with the rest of the world, the holiday season around here has become a time of contemplation and coming together. It takes certain members of the community to plan and build the Yule Lobster, while it takes other members of the community to connive the various ways of getting past the increasingly elaborate security details assigned to its protection in order to send it up in flames.

This year the Yule Lobster was fenced off as has become the norm in recent years. It also had a couple of security guards patrolling it at all times in addition to the webcams set up by the local police department, which we unfortunately didn’t know about. We thought our plan was solid when we sent one of our own disguised as Mrs. Klaus to distract the guards with hot cider and donuts while the rest of us dressed up as elves and rushed the perimeter armed with red-and-green vodka-filled super-soakers and doused the lobster. Then our designated Santa came forward and with a huge “Ho ho ho! Merry Christmas!” tossed a flaming candy cane on the Yule Lobster.

I, for one, can at least say that I am proud to have successfully honored the tradition again this year. Being arrested immediately afterwards was something of a bummer, which I’m sure you all can understand. That said, my holiday spirit remains intact. But anyway, my new friends, that is why I and these other individuals dressed in bright holiday costumes are spending the night in jail with you today.

The End

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AFTERWORD For those of you that know a thing or two about bizarre Nordic Yule traditions, it should be apparent that the Norumbegan Yule Lobster is blatantly based on Gävlebocken, the Yule Goat of Gävle, Sweden. Gävlebocken has a storied and illustrious history of being both majestic and burned to the ground, as the two photos shown below make clear. If you want to know more about the Goat, there’s a lot of info about the splendid straw creature on Visit Gävle’s own site: Gävles strålande julsymbol (you can access the English language edition by clicking the globe icon in the website’s upper right margin).