Andrew Carnegie Free Library celebrates the Icelandic 'Christmas Book Flood'

If you are on social media and you love books, chances are you’ve had someone send you a picture of a Christmas Tree made out of books, or a post about the Icelandic people who give and receive books on Christmas Eve. I am skeptical about much of what I read on the internet, so I wanted to see if this Icelandic tradition was real.

It turns out this legend is true! It is called Jolabokaflod, which translates to “Christmas Book Flood.” The tradition is not very old. It started after World War II, when imports were expensive and scarce. However, paper imports were cheap and plentiful. Giving books and reading them became a centerpiece of Icelanders’ Christmas Eve traditions. The practice continued long after post-War shortages ended. While audiobooks and eBooks have taken off in popularity in the United States, old fashioned print books are still de rigueur in Iceland.

Another interesting fact is that though the population is tiny, only about 339,000 people, Iceland publishes more books per capita than any other country. The people of Iceland take their reading seriously.

I love to snuggle down on a cold winter’s day with a book, a soft blanket and a warm cup of chamomile tea. I have favorite books and poems that I revisit every winter. Working at the Andrew Carnegie Free Library & Music Hall with an eclectic group of voracious readers got me wondering if there were any books that my coworkers associate and reread in winter. So, I asked them and they generously shared their seasonal favorites with me.

Nate Wyrick, our assistant library director, shared this: “When I was younger, much younger like what we would call a tween today, I used to read C.S. Lewis’ ‘The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe’ — sometimes in January or February. The overall message of that book resonated with my Methodist upbringing. A story about overcoming the bitter cold and having an evil winter melt away into a spring filled with hope and promise always brought me some sort of comfort. I didn’t understand then why I enjoyed that book at that particular time of year, but I seemed to always want to read it during the coldest and bleakest time of the year.”

Walker Evans, our library director, reminisced about a tradition in his family. “Tradition and ritual were important in my family when I was growing up. For many years, as the grand finale of my family’s Christmas Eve tradition, we would gather on the couch and listen to my dad read the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas’s ‘A Child’s Christmas in Wales’ aloud. With lush imagery and lyrical prose, Thomas evokes a collage of his own childhood memories of Christmas time in the 1910s and ’20s.

“Our copy of the book featured beautiful woodblock engravings by Fritz Eichenberg, each of them printed indelibly on my mind’s eye,” he continued. “We loved hearing about the cats stalking through the snowy village, the ghostly voice that joined in with the kids’ caroling, and the elderly Miss Protheroe (who courteously offered a group of firefighters something to read upon discovering them in her smoky parlor). The feeling of nostalgia for a simpler, now vanished world is overwhelming at times, and it was rare for my dad to finish the book without tears in his eyes. As I’ve grown older, the themes of lost time resonate with me more. My family usually gathers for New Year’s rather than Christmas these days, but we always make time to read ‘A Child’s Christmas in Wales.’”

Executive director Maggie Forbes shared a family tradition that began in her childhood, and was fully embraced by her two daughters, and now by her two granddaughters.

“Way too predictable, but Clement Moore’s ‘The Night Before Christmas’ is always read at my house. It’s part of the passage from Christmas Eve to Christmas. My librarian mother purchased a gorgeously illustrated Tasha Tudor edition the year before Caitlin was born. This reading tradition began when she was six-months-old and never faltered, not even during Caitlin and Alice’s teens and 20s. Now, of course, with Ida (7) and Louisa (5) joining in, there are five of us crowded onto the couch.”

I fell in love the Laurie (a man) Lee’s poem “Twelfth Night” when I sang the Samuel Barber arrangement of it when I was at Duquesne. “O, never again it seems can green things run, Or sky birds fly, Or the grass exhale its humming breath. Powdered with pimpernels, from this dark lung of winter.”

As I would walk from the bus stop up to the bluff and the cold air would freeze me as it blew between the buildings, it seemed that I was living in the “dark lung of winter.” I knew what Lee was talking about.

Whatever holiday you celebrate — Solstice, Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanzaa, Yule, Yalda, Pancha Ganapati, or something else, — we at the library wish you health and happiness.

If you have a favorite wintertime read, please feel free to share it with me at 412-276-3456, x. 11 or doughteryj@einetwork.net. I’d love to know what books are your wintertime necessity.