Thanks, Eya.
I see the nisse-brother and nisse-sister intends to return to the Faeroe Islands and Greenland after having visited their families and spend Christmas in Denmark this year.
Nisser are no different from humans in that respect. One day they grow up and leave home and perhaps have their own families.
Who knows? In perhaps as little as 200 years we will be presented to a nisse-baby or two? ?
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QMII was supposed to have attended Christmas service today, in the afternoon mind you, before the Christmas celebrations. And per tradition also tomorrow.
But that is not to be this year.
And that leads me to perhaps the most enduring superstition for almost exactly 500 years.
Previously there was no tradition for going to church on Christmas Eve. People stayed inside after dark...
Instead the dead went to church on Christmas Night. Attending a service.
One pre-dawn Christmas-morning a farmer in his bed thought he heard voices from the local church and woke up his wife, they should attend the service. The wife, being a devout Christian jumped out of bed, got dressed in a hurry and rushed over to the church. It was still dark, mind you...
Inside the church she recognized the man she was sitting next to - he had died a few years before. Looking around in the dim light there were no living souls in the church, the congregation were all people who were dead!
A voice told her: "Unbutton your cape", which she had put on in her haste, "and get out!" She fled while the cape was torn from her shoulders.
When the sun came up the locals found her cape, it had been shredded by the dead trying to take her with them...
- There were many such stories and they were firmly believed, so no one went near the church, should they be brave enough to even venture outside on Christmas Night.
https://i.imgur.com/KdLA6c8.jpg
https://romanrobroek.nl/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/churchofnineghosts_3.jpg
But on Christmas Morning, everybody went to church. That was the Christmas service for the living.
One theory for this superstition is that midnight masses were banned after the Reformation as a Catholic custom. But many priests and churchgoers remained Catholics at heart and had secret midnight masses.
The Protestant priests certainly did little to dispelling the belief that the midnight mass had now become a service for the dead.
And with that I wish you all a merry and not least healthy Christmas.