Jolabokaflod

A Very Christmasy Vocab Word o'th'Week:

Our Zuko’s Musings vocab word of this holiday-full week is an appropriately festive one: Jolabokaflod.

What does it mean? It’s an Icelandic term for an Icelandic holiday, one that, within the past few years in particular, has gained much yearning and wistful popularity amongst those few (those happy few) of us left in the US that still identify as intellectuals. The word translates to “Christmas Book Flood,” and no, I don’t know what umlauts or other accent-y thingies to place on top of which of the letters, so don’t ask. But if a Christmas book flood sounds like a great idea to you, listen up—you might want to embrace a version of this within your own holiday arrangement of traditions.

This is an Icelandic winter holiday that takes place on Christmas Eve, and here’s how it’s celebrated: Books are exchanged as gifts. Then, the rest of the night is spent in pjs and bed, reading said books and eating chocolate.

I know, right???!

Zukobokaflod 

I actually have a self imposed tradition on Christmas, which sounds a lot like this, whereby I give only books to all those receiving gifts from me. It’s very on brand for me, and I feel like it’s important. Why? I dunno—I feel like people don’t read enough and “kids these days” and all that. And I want to share the book-love, as well as to be a good model as a book lover. If you just take a look around my home—there’s crammed-full bookshelves as well as stacks of books in every room that my partner and I are in the middle of. His family has already gotten used to me flooding them with books for Christmas, and some of them have told me they’d never heard of such a tradition but that they love the idea.

The Jolabokaflod tradition, for me, began one year when I had no money for gifts, but did have a decent amount of store credit at my favorite used book store. So that was my gift solution that year. I’ve kept it up ever since. Giving books, after all, is a very me thing to do, and these days, though not nearly so financially constrained, I continue to do my own version of Jolabokaflod for those loved ones and relatives surrounding me. Could I care less that any of these hapless gift-receivers might not appreciate a book as a gift? Nope, I could not. As the years go by, I still insist on inundating my peeps with the Zuko-bokaflod, whether they like it or not. Luckily, most of them do seem to like it, even those who aren’t bookworms themselves. Does this mean that books are just empirically good gifts, for anyone? I think so.

There’s only one rule to the Zuko version of Jolabokaflod: if you don’t like the book or if you already have it or for whatever reason you don’t want the book I give you, I won’t take it personally. But! you needs must give it away to someone who’ll like it, or, barring candidates for that, donate it to a used bookstore or goodwill or library. You’re not allowed to toss it. That’s the only rule. Regifting the rejects is required.

Why this book obsession?

We do have a bit of a performative book lover stereotype in this country, and that can be traced back to a few different things, including white feminism, sentimental literature and misogyny, and the fetishization of print culture. But, a) so many cultural critics and feminist scholars before me and parallel to me have written about all these things before (for some of the most entertaining and thorough of these, listen to podcast Witch, Please’s episodes on Media Studies, Print Culture, Sentimentalism, and Feminism among others); and b) I find complaining about those things from my perspective not just repetitive but boring. I don’t want to dig into the gory details of my love of books being an escape from the brutal and abusive bullying of my childhood, how my early and advanced reading ability isolated me from my peers and made me a target, or how being a nerd wasn’t cool when I was growing up, like it can be now. Boring whinging. I’m exhausted as well as bored by analyzing how love of Fantasy or romance novels especially has traditionally been thought of as silly kid stuff or idle women’s entertainment that serious breadwinning men don’t deign to have time for. Ursula K. LeGuin discussed that beautifully, years ago, and I don’t have anything to add. Or how the privilege of book ownership overlaps with race and class divides, manifested in its ugliest extreme by the recent interior decoration trend of shelving books with their spines faced inward. Others have detailed these things multiple times before me and are still doing so now. Besides, I don’t want to give up my attachment to books, fetish- or elitist though it may be. A book fetish? Okay. Sure. Don’t kink shame me, man…

And anyway, I love Jolabokaflod. I love that the entire country of Iceland gets its economy on board with the immense book sales that happen around the imminent day. I love the practice of picking out a book just for a loved one, that you think they might like. It’s so exciting when they do, and you can nerd out with them about it, and omg-wait-till-you-get-to-this-one-part... I love book clubs, too, even those like mine that are just two people who read the same book and get together over pints to hash it out. And I so, so love the idea of exchanging books, wearing soft pajamas, and clambering into bed together to warm our feet on each other, and our hands on cups of hot chocolate. To read that way until the book falls on our noses to wake us up just enough to put it aside on our nightstand, our dreams populated with the characters we just met in those pages.

‘Scuse me, I gotta go—I have to put my pajama bottoms in the dryer for a minute. Happy Xmas Eve eve, and a Merry Jolabokaflod to you.