"In today's busy world we don't take time to fill our souls with beauty. I pray that each one who reads these pages will pause long enough to recapture Yules long gone and perhaps to find back there in time the key to happiness and contentment in this restless age."
—Thyra Ferré Bjorn
In Once Upon a Christmas Time the beloved author of Papa's Wife, Papa's Daughter, Mama's Way, and Dear Papa offers a delightfully warm account of Christmases spent in her native Swedish Lapland some fifty years ago.
As this appealing volume explains, Swedish Christmas observances are steeped in ancient tradition and folklore. For years the native Swede believed that anyone who set foot outside his home on Christmas Eve would be bewitched. Two of the most famous Christmas symbols are Tomte (a cross between an Irish leprechaun and Holland's St. Nicholas) and the Crown of St. Lucia, worn for the Festival of Lights, which marks the beginning of the Christmas period of preparation.
Mrs. Bjorn vividly describes these fascinating preparations: the baking of cookies from dough on which the sun must not shine lest disaster strike the household, the preparation of the pig's head for a centerpiece, the house cleaning to keep evil spirits away, the old custom of the Julklapper, and the later custom of shopping for and wrapping gifts. She tells, too, how her family set out a sheaf of grain for the birds, fed the farm animals, chopped down the Christmas tree, and prepared the smörgåsbord. Her recollections of the Christmas Dawn Service, the plundering of the tree, and the procession of the star-boys are filled with color and charm.
The final chapter compares the neon signs, commercialism, and artificial glitter of present-day Christmas with the warm, real one of years ago, which Mrs. Bjorn brings to life in every reader's heart.
Brought up in a small village in Swedish Lapland, Thyra Ferre Bjorn was one of eight children born to a clergyman. The family came to America in 1924, when her father received a call to a Swedish church in Springfield, Massachusetts. Now residents of Longmeadow, Massachusetts, Mrs. Bjorn and her husband, Robert J. Bjorn, have two daughters and four grandchildren.
—from the dust jacket
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