This one really shouldn’t be a secret, but the rampant Disneyfication of our culture has made it one. Here it is: the muted, sad-eyed heroine of “The Little Mermaid” never gets to marry the prince. The author of “The Little Mermaid,” Hans Christian Andersen, saves her spirit at the last minute, transforming her into a “daughter of the air,” but there’s no royal wedding, not for her. Her name isn’t “Ariel,” either. Andersen’s mermaids don’t go in for names, or if they do, humans probably wouldn’t be able to pronounce them.
While you might not have been familiar with the original ending, I’m sure you have at least heard of “The Little Mermaid.” You’ve no doubt heard of “The Ugly Duckling” and maybe even “The Little Match Girl,” “Thumbelina,” and “The Snow Queen.” But did you know that Andersen actually wrote more than one hundred fifty stories? Some, like “The Bog-king’s Daughter” are highly suspenseful while others consist of conversations between kitchen implements. A few, like “The Wild Swans,” are based on older folk motifs, and many more were inspired by the deep history and prehistory of the Danish landscape.
As if writing one hundred fifty stories were not enough, old H. C. was also a master of Scherenschnitte, the art of snipping lacelike pictures out of single sheets of paper, which he liked to do to illustrate his own stories. Christmas was a season close to Andersen’s heart, so I would not be surprised if he could also make all those intricate paper forms that the Danes still make to hang upon the Juletrae. In fact, Andersen himself is supposed to have invented the signature Danish Christmas tree ornament—the woven paper heart.
No matter how many woven hearts or paper stars you make, you always need more the next year. To this day, the Danes set aside time on December weekends for the whole family to gather at the dining room table to repair old ornaments and make new ones. While I’m not exactly Danish, this is one of my favorite Yuletide traditions, and I heartily recommend it.
Not everyone is as nimble-fingered as H.C., so you can leave it to the least crafty member of the family to choose and read a tale from Andersen’s corpus while the rest of you work. Of course, paper crafts and storytelling are only two of the elements necessary for a magical pre-Yule get-together: the other three are candlelight, coffee, and cookies.
But first, you’ve got to go up to the attic to get that box of ornaments down and see how many have survived from last year. If a trip to the attic sounds like an uninteresting errand, you can pretend it’s actually the attic of some stately brick townhouse in Odense, the kind of fine house to which Andersen himself might have been invited to spend Christmas Eve.
December in the Old Townhouse
As you come to the top of the last narrow flight of stairs, you can hear the risers creaking under your feet while overhead the rafters whisper to one another about happier days spent in the forest hundreds of years ago.
That grouchy red-capped gnome—every old Danish house has one—scuttles into the corner when he hears you coming. He’ll make no effort to speak to you, though you might notice his eyes glowing hotly through the cobwebs. Don’t let him bother you. He knows you owe him nothing until Christmas Eve when you’ll bring him a big bowl of porridge with a pat of butter on top. Not that he’ll talk to you then either; if a gnome wants conversation, he’ll seek out the cat.
There, under the eaves, is a fresh blossoming of frost ferns on the single, round window pane. If you were to press a hot penny against the glass, you could gaze out over the empty nests of twigs crowning the chimney pots. The storks who wove them in the spring are long gone, having flown off to Egypt to spend the holidays gossiping with the swallows on the banks of the Nile.
If the house is a very tall one, you may be able to make out the ravens clawing at the frozen furrows beyond the city walls or, if you are facing the sea, the wild swans bobbing on the waves. In the opposite direction lies the marsh where the dreaded bog king dwells under a ceiling of frozen peat. A witch, too, lists the bog as her home address, but she is more likely to be found in the meadow, brewing beer for her many children and keeping an eye on the troublesome will-o’-the-wisps.
Now, where is that box of Christmas decorations? You listen for the tinkling sighs of glass ornaments through the cardboard, but there are so many conversations going on up here that it’s hard to make out. The old kitchen things are the loudest, but from another box you can hear the more sophisticated exchanges of the porcelain figurines that used to stand proudly in glass-fronted cabinets in the parlor. They complain bitterly of the triumph of Danish Modern and how it has resulted in their exile to the attic. Not to be outdone, an old tin soldier is crying aloud with boredom, having fallen down a crack between the floorboards.
At last you spot the box of ornaments. It’s smaller than you remember. You dust off the lid, take the box carefully in your arms and head for the stairs, forgetting the poor tin soldier, the porcelain shepherdess and her chimneysweep, forgetting even to promise the gnome that you’ll be back in a few weeks with his porridge. Later on, he’ll complain of this to the cat, but none of that concerns you now. The days before Yule are trickling away, and you have work to do!
And now back to the twenty-first century. I have one more Yuletide secret to impart. Gather the kids; this is important. It concerns Santa Claus. The truth about Santa is that he doesn’t really live at the North Pole; in 1927 it was revealed to a select few via Finnish radio that Santa’s workshop is actually located atop Korvatunturi Mountain in Lapland, not far, perhaps, from the Snow Queen’s stronghold. I wonder if Hans Christian Andersen knew?