If I don't get any buns there's going to be trouble...

Whacking cats, twigging parents, jingling, buns, and big balls.

Yesterday—Sunday the 19^th of February—was Fastelavn in Denmark.

The importance of Fastelavn in Danish culture caught me by surprise the first year I lived here. Danes were baffled by my ignorance. It was called “Shrovetide” in English, they told me. Surely I was familiar with Shrovetide?

I’d never seen the word Shrovetide used anywhere outside of 19^th century novels.

So I had to research it and based on that research I wrote up a brief history of Shrovetide for the blog I had going at the time.  I reprint it here in its entirety:

The History of Shrovetide

The name “Shrovetide” is derived from the ancient practice of Roman Catholic priests shroving their parishioners in preparation for forty days of privation. Both practices—the shroving and the period of privation it prepared for—were borrowed from the Eastern Orthodox church. Hence the name “Lent.”

The period of Lent is intended to commemorate the forty days and nights Jesus spent in the wilderness after John gave him a swirly in the River Jordan.

We know very little of Jesus' activities while he was in the wilderness. In fact, compounding all the evidence from the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, the full extent of our knowledge is that Jesus didn't eat for forty days. That's nearly six weeks. They tell us he went nearly six weeks without eating, then add that “he was hungry.”

Sometimes Biblical interpretation is pretty straightforward stuff.

Unfortunately for Jesus, Carnival had not yet been invented. Carnival is a tradition that evolved out of Lent during the middle ages, when people decided that if they were really going to be abstinent for forty days (the period from Ash Wednesday to Good Friday), then at least they were going to get roaring drunk beforehand. As a result, the French began calling Shrove Tuesday “Fat Tuesday.” Or, in English, “Mardi Gras.”

The citizens of New Orleans, under French rule for most of the 1700s, did an especially good job of eating and drinking to excess on Mardi Gras. As their territory passed first to Spanish and ultimately U.S. stewardship, each new government did their best to stamp out the festivities. This ensured that the fabulous celebrations would become a tradition. Mardi Gras became synonymous with balls and parades.

Wealthy citizens had the biggest balls. The waterfront balls were always full of seamen. Radicals were known for their infamous red balls, while nature lovers had unappealing green balls. Barbers had cleanshaven balls. The prisons had macabre hanging balls. Women were discouraged from having balls of their own, but there was no shortage of wealthy men willing to pay women to hold their balls.

And so on.

Eventually the double-entendres got old. There was more to Mardi Gras than big balls. There were also parades that became more and more fantastic each year, with spectacular gaudy floats from which scantily clad women tossed strings of beads out to the adoring crowds.

Because of their religious significance, these came to be known as Venerable Beads, and they remain quite popular in Britain.

Shroving is still a popular recreation in parts of western Europe.

Fastelavn in Literature

In February of 2004, the season of my first Danish Fastlelavn, I still entertained hopes of teaching myself Danish. Toward that end, I’d picked up a book of children’s stories at a used book store earlier that winter. The book was entitled 100 Godnathistorier ("100 Goodnight Stories"), by Inge Aasted, and is apparently a classic of Danish pedagogical literature. It was first published in 1955.

For a sense of how Danish pedagogical literature had changed over time, I should point out that one of the most popular books in the year’s preceding 2004 was Muldvarpen, der ville vide, hvem der havde lavet lort paa dens hoved, or “The mole who wanted to know who had taken a shit on his head.”

Denmark had come a long way, baby.

Because Aasted’s stories were all very short and used simple language, my idea was to translate the stories and email them to my nieces, aged 6 and 4 at the time, back in Massachusetts. This went reasonably well, and I encountered few difficulties in translating stories like “The Old Traincar,” “The Tease-Sick Fly,” “The Moon-Man's Clock Goes Wrong” and other such childish fare.

Then I stumbled into trouble.

One of the stories in Aasted's book was entitled Fastelavn. I didn’t know much about Shrovetide (as I’ve already demonstrated) and wasn’t aware of any American Shrovetide traditions, so I was more at sea than usual when I set out to translate that particular story.

I forged ahead anyway, and here's what I came up with (after a few minor fixes by Herself).

Shrovetide
From “101 Goodnight Stories” by Inge Aasted
“Translated” by Greg Nagan

Grete was 7 years old and Niels was 4 and they’d been practicing their Shrovetide Song for a long time. Finally one day they could use it, for it was Shrovetide Sunday and they had to “twig up” their mother and father.

Niels had made a pirate mask, and Grete helped make him look just like a pirate and herself to look like Little Red Riding Hood.

When Niels was ready, he looked at himself in the mirror.

“I’m afraid of myself,” he said, and was just about to cry.

“It’s all just for fun,” said Grete, “we have to put masks on so mom and dad won’t know us, that’s the whole fun of it all.”

“Well, all right,” said Niels, but he didn’t look particularly delighted.

“You have to ‘twig up’ mom,” said Grete, “she’ll be all scared—she cannot possibly see that it’s you!”

The children went into the bedroom and beat on mother and father’s comforter with their Shrovetide Twigs while they sang the Shrovetide Song.

“Oh no,” said mother, “help! Here is a gruesome pirate, how did he ever get into the house?”

“You mustn’t be frightened at all, mother,” Niels hurried to say, “it’s just me, Niels, and Red Riding Hood is just Grete. I can’t stand him, the pirate, but I’d really like Shrovetide Buns.”

“You shall have them,” laughed mother, and hurried into her clothes.

When they sat down at the breakfast table, and Niels was about to eat a second bun, he said to his mother:

“It’s sure a good thing I said who I was, when I was a pirate, or else you never would have known me. It’s good I’m just Niels, ‘cause you never would have given the pirate buns—right, mom?”

The end.

Think what such a Shrovetide meant for Danish parents: early one winter Sunday morning, they'd wake up to children in costumes singing and whacking them with sticks until they got out of bed to bake them some goodies.

It was, as you can imagine, a doomed tradition.

Today, Danish parents can visit the local grocery or department store, or even the neighborhood kiosk, and pick up painted “Shrovetide Twigs” bundled together with toys and candy and wrapped in colorful cellophane. These are then presented to well-behaved children at a decent hour on Shrovetide morning. No costumes, whacking, or singing required.

I struggled mightily to understand all these traditions as I worked through the translation, and was enormously proud of myself when I was done.

(I don’t recall my niece’s reaction to the piece, but the exercise wasn’t really about them. Probably my sister never tormented them with their uncle’s translated stories anyway.)

Shrovetide would still prove to be my doom, however, as I came across another Shrovetide story two days later that was so culturally disorienting I abandoned the translation project altogether.

The story in question was Bedstemor Vinni Holder Fastelavnsfest (“Grandma Vinni Holds a Shrovetide Party”). It contained a number of difficulties to my budding translation skills, only partly relating to Shrovetide.

First, there was the unfortunate similarity of the words for kittens (kvillinger) and twins (tvillinger). They look very different to me now, and I’m proud to say I no longer mix them up, but anyone with American eyes can hopefully see my confusion wasn’t entirely unreasonable. Second there was the objectionable fact of one of the characters costuming itself as a “negro.” Thirdly there was a bizarre mention of cats being beaten on barrels. And lastly, there was a question of someone being awarded the prize of “cat-king.” Add all this together into a Shrovetide “context” that I was trying to deduce on the fly and you can imagine my confusion. My original translation of the penultimate paragraph looked something like this:

“Kat became cat-king!” shouted the children, and all the rest of the day they knew the kittens from each other—because Kit was a clown and Kat was a negro-cat-king.

It was hardly the sort of thing I wanted to send back to my nieces.

I had a long list of questions for Herself when she got home that night. Why were kittens being dressed up as clowns and negros? Why were cats being beaten on a barrel? If there are two cats and one of them is beaten on a barrel, does the other one become cat-king by default? Should we keep our own cats inside on Fastelavn?  And so on.

Herself patiently explained that I had confused the words for kittens and twins: Kit and Kat were not a pair of kittens, but rather human twins. “Beating the cat off the barrel” is a children’s Fastelavn festivity similar to the Mexican piñata tradition—you've got a barrel full of candy, with a stuffed cat on top of it, and the kids take turns whaling on the barrel until it breaks open and spills out its treats. The kid who smashes the barrel open gets the stuffed cat and a crown and is hailed as “cat-king” the rest of the day.

That’s what I was told at the time, but having lived in Denmark damn near twenty years and attended countless barrel-whackings as my daughters grew up I have yet to see a single barrel topped with a cat of any kind. 

And these days, of course, there is often a cat queen crowned along with the cat king—and Danish kids no longer dress up as African tribal villagers (which is what the so-called “negro” costume of the benighted past amounted to).  Such cosplay is obviously offensive, and it’s widely understood today that wearing such a costume can only lead to one becoming Prime Minister of Canada. 

That’s not something any Dane wants for their children.

Fastelavn in Practice

“Think what such a Shrovetide meant for Danish parents,” I wrote a few paragraphs ago. “Early one winter Sunday morning, they'd wake up to children in costumes singing and whacking them with sticks until they got out of bed to bake them some goodies.” That’s accurate enough as far as I went in describing the old Fastelavn traditions, but I didn't go far enough.

Once the kids finally get their hands on the extorted buns, you see, the parents set them loose on the world. The children then go door-to-door in their costumes, singing their extortionary song to every Dane fool enough to open their door:

Fastelavn er mit navn,
boller vil jeg have.
Hvis jeg ingen boller få
så laver jeg ballade!

In English (and out of rhyme and meter):

Shrovetide is my name
buns are what I’m after.
If I don’t get any buns
I’m going to make some trouble.

You don’t give them buns: you toss them some candy or a couple of crowns and they go on their way. It's like a nation full of budding little congresspeople.

The shrewd American will by now have discerned some similarities between Danish Fastelavn and a certain American holiday. The only real difference between Fastelavn and Halloween is that the kids seem to go out during daylight and they want money instead of candy.  Also, there was no Halloween in Denmark back when we first moved to Denmark: trick-or-treating was only assimilated into Denmark about ten years ago.  Eldest still remembers getting a lot of doors slammed on her face the first couple of years she tried it, but these days our neighbors compete to have the most garish Halloween decorations. In the early 2010s ours was the only house in the neighborhood with carved pumpkins out front; as Halloween caught on we began decorating our carport with an ever-increasing amount of creepy decorations we bought specifically for that purpose on every trip to America. Now it’s reached the point where we’re one of the least decorated houses on the block.

It’s either cultural appropriation on steroids or relentless cultural imperialism.

I’ll wrap the whole thing up with another anecdote from my first Danish Fastelavn back in 2004. Herself took me for a walk around our Frederiksberg neighborhood to let me educate myself a little more on Fastelavn through simple immersion. We were fortunate enough to encounter several costumed little extortionists, including one little Superman ambling alone down a quiet residential avenue who was kind enough to grant Herself an interview.

I transcribed it into an English translation for the old blog, so I’m able to provide a complete transcript without having to rely on memory.

Note that Danes refer to the act of going around and extorting Fastelavn money as "jingling" (rasle), due to the sound their money-holders make when they shake them in your face and threaten you with trouble.

Also note that I actually still have a photo of our subject (he’s probably in his late twenties by now):

SUPERMAN INTERVIEW

Herself: What a beautiful costume!

Superman: (Stops, looks around, fidgets nervously.)

Herself: Show me how strong you are!

Superman: (Continues to eye us suspiciously.)

Herself: Oh, come on, show us your muscles!

Superman: I've been out jingling. I'm cold.

Herself: Yes, you need a hat.

Superman: No, it's my hands.

Herself: Where's your mom?

Superman: She's at home. My hands are cold.

Herself: You better go home to her then.

Superman: Yeah, but my big sister is out jingling, too, with her friends. She's my big sister.

Herself: Maybe you can join her.

Superman: No, because she's out jingling with her friends.

Herself: Oh, then I guess you can't.

Superman: No, my big sister's still out there.

Superman sighs, shrugs, and continues on his way.

And that was that.