How to Fail at Being Finnish: Diary #5

A Very Finnish Christmas

Welcome to my ongoing record of life as a Brit in Finland. Each week I write about the things that colour my days and the, occasionally weird, ways this country keeps surprising me.

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Wil

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Friday, December 19

I’m drawn to stories about people who feel out of place. It’s probably why my favourite Bob Dylan song is “Red River Shore”, a beautiful, late nineties dirge that manages to be as much about love and loss as it is death and the fading past. He starts one of the verses by calling himself “a stranger… in a strange land.” I often find that lyric running through my head.

It’s also why I particularly appreciate the story my Finnish teacher tells us in class today.

We’ve segued from noun conjugations to tales of our teacher as a young man leaving Finland for the first time. We learn that he spent time in America and, being the shy and reserved Finn he was back then, he had to get used to his new American friends constantly asking him if there was something wrong; his typical Finnish quietness so strange to them.

As the months passed and he became more accustomed to the intricacies of American social decorum, he found himself hearing that question less and less.

And then he returned home.

Back in Finland and ever so slightly changed, it took minutes before his old Finnish friends would politely ask him that once familiar question:

“Is there something wrong?”

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Saturday, December 20

It’s a decade now since I left England and I do wonder if I’ve been away long enough to have started behaving “wrong” somehow as well. And, yes, I am likely thinking of this now more than usual because my mother is arriving from London today.

Her arrival itself is always a beautifully unsubtle demonstration of the differences between my two homes: south-east England and south-west Finland.

I am at the local train station with my son to pick her up. Alighting the train ahead of her, men and women are dressed in the typical uniform of Finnish winter: muted greys and indistinct blacks. Nothing that might show oneself off, nothing that draws attention. The lack of snow this winter only adds to the landscape’s drab monotony.

And then I see her.

She is clothed in a brilliant white jacket with a hood trimmed with the fur of what appears to be a mythical golden animal. Her suitcase is a shade of virgin copper. So glam. So London. So deeply un-Finnish. Tears fill her eyes and she calls out with joy when my son runs up to hug her.

The locals keep their quiet distance.

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Sunday, December 21

Subtler distinctions will eventually manifest themselves during my mother’s visit though. I often feel like getting compliments from a Finn is like getting blood from, well, not a stone, more like getting blood from a greased pig: it’s possible, but likely requires a lot of work.

For a Brit, compliments and praise are part of the social order.

We are sitting on a park bench watching my kids play on a dinosaur-shaped climbing frame when my mother blurts out the Finnish word for park: “puisto”. She has, god bless her rhinestone-studded boots, been learning Finnish as well for a while now.

“That’s right,” I tell her, followed by what I promise is a well-intentioned correction of her pronunciation.

“Oh,” she says, with a sigh.

“Sorry” I tell her, realising my encouragement wasn’t nearly ebullient enough. “You’re doing very well”, I tell her.

Later I will cook her a stew of beef and dumplings and she will give me more compliments than I have been afforded in the past 12 months put together.

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Tuesday, December 23

We are now in Pori, my wife’s hometown, to spend Christmas with her family. My mother-in-law will cook an elaborate feast on Christmas Eve and, despite local customs, I will shower her with praise.

I will then cook an elaborate feast on Christmas Day and, keeping with local customs, I will receive no compliments at all.

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Wednesday, December 24

I should mention that, here in Finland, the big Christmas celebration happens on Christmas Eve. Stranger even than this is how, as late as 8 in the morning, my children are still in bed. No sign at all of the ritual dragging parents from bed at first light I made my parents suffer when I was a boy on Christmas morning.

This is because, good little Finns that they are, my kids understand there are no presents waiting for them under the tree in the morning. Instead, gifts will be hand-delivered by a strange man (me) dressed as Father Christmas sometime well after lunch is finished.

The differences between the Christmas of my childhood and the one my children know don’t stop there of course.

Once breakfast is over (which consists of a bowl of traditional Christmas rice porridge, not the champagne, scrambled eggs with smoked salmon and spontaneous arguing I grew up with) the presents must still wait.

I am even called on, hard as it is to accept, to get properly dressed. Socks and everything. The next Christmas ritual, like the porridge, is observed by a significant proportion of the Finnish population. No, I am not talking about going to church, that would be far too “normal”.

I’m talking about going to the graveyard.

*

When we arrive, the enormous cemetery on the outskirts of town is already full of people. There must be thousands of graves here and at least hundreds of people visiting. The midday sun hovering above the horizon shines brilliant light through the cemetery trees. It renders even my infant son’s shadow at least 50 feet long. In my father-in-law’s hand is a white plastic bag full of candles. Each one is cased in clear plastic and capped with a golden metal top. It is the same kind of candle everyone is holding here. The same kind that has been filling shelves in Lidl, gas stations and convenience stores for weeks now. Occasionally the low sun will hide behind the clouds and the light of day will dim enough for the glow from those countless candles, set on the gravestones, to illuminate throughout the cemetery. Like stars in the midnight firmament.

We visit several graves on this Christmas visit. On each a candle is lit in silence and left. Eventually we arrive at my mother-in-law’s parents’ grave. She tells me a story of when her mother was visiting and tending her husband’s grave, years from when she would rest with him here herself.

Somehow, the story goes, the gravestone fell on her hand and trapped her.

“Luckily,” my mother-in-law says, “it happened in the spring. The ground was not hardened by sun or frozen from cold.”

“How did she get out?” I ask

“Well, two young boys heard her crying. And they knew something was wrong because… well…”

“Well what?” I ask.

She smiles. “No Finn would ever let themselves be seen crying anywhere as public as a graveyard.”

*

My last remaining grandparent died this year. My father’s mother. By some twist of time and the generations, my own son is the age I was when I first experienced death when my mother’s father died. From then on, my mother would encourage us to light a candle for him whenever we happened to visit a church or cathedral. I’m forty next year and I still feel compelled to light a candle whenever I step within a few yards of a consecrated building.

Here at the graveyard there is a stone memorial where those with no grave to visit can light a candle as well. I ask my son if he’d like to light one for grandma before correcting myself with great-grandma.

He nods and we light one together.

*

On the walk home my son turns to his sister. She turned 4 in October. He says to her: “Will you light a candle for me one day?”

After a moment she nods her head firmly. Then she turns to him and says: “Yes… But I won’t kill you.”

It is 2pm and the sun is already threatening to end the day. Finnish winter. The sky is baby blue and pastel pink. The colour of a newborn’s bedroom. As I often do, I think of that Bob Dylan lyric again.

Much as I can relate to those words of being an outsider, it’s the subsequent line in the song, I think, that keeps me returning to it:

I’m a stranger here in a strange land, he sings, before adding:

But I know it’s where I belong.

The diary will continue…

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