Lucia, and the buns that come with her

Thirteenth of December, before it is light. Candles, singing, coffee, and a tray of saffron buns.

Almost everything about that morning is younger than it feels, and the parts that are old are old in a different way than the story usually told.

Why the thirteenth

Under the Julian calendar, 13 December was the winter solstice. Sweden moved to the Gregorian calendar in the eighteenth century, the actual solstice slid to the twenty-first or twenty-second, and the celebration stayed where it was. So the date is a fossil of an older calendar, marking the longest night in a year that no longer has its longest night there.

Lucia herself is real and Sicilian: Lucia of Syracuse, executed for her faith, traditionally in 304. Her name is from lux. She was venerated in Swedish Catholic calendars until the Reformation.

Nordiska museet describes what happened next better than I can paraphrase, so I will keep their list: an Italian saint, medieval carnival customs, a Neapolitan boat song, and a festival day in western Sweden. Those four things became one morning.

Underneath sits an older layer, lussenatt, a night when the ordinary rules were suspended, supernatural things were abroad, and animals could speak. In Catholic times it was also the last chance to eat properly before the Christmas fast, which is why eating well through that night is the part of it that survived.

White gowns and candles in the hair are documented from 1764, at a manor in Västergötland, described with angel wings and candelabras. The procession as it now exists is a twentieth-century construction: Skansen took it up in the 1890s as an exhibition of old rural custom, and a Stockholm newspaper ran a Lucia competition in the late 1920s with an electrically lit procession, which is roughly when the modern version spread nationally.

The bun is Dutch

Lussekatt looks like it means Lucia's cat, and the story attached to it is that the devil went about in the form of a cat beating children, while Christ appeared as a child handing out buns, and the buns were dyed yellow with saffron because the devil cannot bear light.

That is a real piece of collected folk belief and I like it. It is not where the word comes from.

It descends instead from the Dutch and north German duivekater, a sweet wheaten Christmas bread, probably arriving in Gothenburg in the sixteen hundreds. Older west-Swedish forms of the name are dövelskatt and dyvelskatt. The museum position is that the cat and the devil are both Swedified mishearings of that word and have nothing to do with either animal or adversary.

Saffron follows from the same route. It is an expensive imported spice in an imported feast-day bread, which is a sufficient explanation on its own and does not need the devil.

Worth knowing: saffron is usual but not compulsory. The Institute for Language and Folklore is careful to say the bun is usually spiced with it.

The shapes have names

Most common is a single S with each end coiled inward and a raisin set in each coil. That shape is the julgalt (Christmas boar), also called an enkel kuse. There are others with their own names — gullvagn the golden wagon, bock the billy goat, and prästens hår, the priest's hair.

Most Swedish households now make the S and could not tell you it had a name. I would not read too much into the boar; the name is documented, the pre-Christian sacrifice story people attach to it is not.

Saffron, practically

Buy threads, not powder. Grind them with a pinch of the recipe's sugar, and steep them in a little warm milk for at least an hour before mixing, ideally overnight. Saffron added dry to a dough gives you yellow streaks and not much flavour.

Do not increase the quantity to get more colour. Past a certain point saffron turns medicinal, and the line is closer than you would like.

It is an enriched dough, heavy with butter, so it proves slowly, and it wants to be baked the morning it is eaten. A lussekatt on the second day is a different and sadder object.