Swedish Candles or Stars in the Windows!

Swedish Welcome Light

Alan Waller, lives in Sweden (1966-present)
Let’s take this the long way round. Once upon a time, when almost everyone in Sweden lived by farming, people lived in cosy villages of log cabins clustered around a church, surrounded by fields. The rest was forest.

If a family had two sons, it was tempting to let them each inherit half the farm, but half a farm wouldn’t support either family. But log cabins are inherently transportable. Using a knife, you cut a number into each log. Then you lift them all off each other and use you dray horse to drag them a few at a time to the new site where you put the cabin back together like a Lego model. In Swedish law, houses were counted as moveable chattels, while the farm land was real estate!
So one son would inherit no land, only the buildings. He would need to break new fields on the edge of the forest, but wouldn’t need to build himself a house, just move the existing one. The other son would inherit the fields, all ready to use, but he would need to build himself a new house.
In many parts of the country, land reforms re-allocated farming land, giving each family all their land in one place rather than spread around in small patches. Such families would move their farm buildings to their new land allocation and would then save loads of time previously spent trekking from the village to outlying fields. This process was called “the exploding of the villages” because the old cosy center disappeared leaving the church all by itself. (This reform process ground to a halt due to the massive emigrations to the USA, when it became impossible to secure the permission of all the property rights holders in the family.)

These two processes gave us a landscape of fields with scattered farmhouses and isolated churches. The cosy village was gone. In that situation, wouldn’t you like to see lights twinkling through the winter darkness in the windows of those people who used to be your close neighbors? And wouldn’t you do the same for them?

                     And once you get used to it, you won’t stop doing it. If Grammy had lights in the windows of her home, you will too. That’s what makes it Homey, ok?

Answer requested by Goran Salimovic

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