Skyrgámur......skyr-gobbler arrived today and made a straight line for the dairy, where he found a barrels of skyr* He gobbles down all the skyr and is rewarded with stomach aches and pains. He is heard far and near, as he cries out “I should not have eaten all the skyr”.
Warning!!! Lock up your favorite buttons. Skyrgámur has taken to stealing buttons. Skyr is so plentiful these days that Skyrgámur eats and eats it until the buttons on his shirt pop...sometimes so far that he cannot find them again...his only recourse is to steal buttons.
Skyr is a dairy product similar to yogurt that has been an stable part of the Icelandic diet for more than 1,100 years. Whole Foods imports Skyr from Iceland's Skyr.is. I am very happy about that...it is nice to have one of my favorite foods from Iceland in my refrigerator here in the States.
The Christmas Cat (Jólaköttur) has been striking terror in the hearts of Icelandic children for generations.
The Jólaköttur, is an enormous and ferocious ugly specimen of a cat, who has an appetite for misbehaving children. Naughty children did not get new things to wear for Christmas, thus they would have to stay in bed, miss all the festivities and worse, be eaten by the Christmas Cat.
Oh! The horror of it. I was always a good girl, really I was ;) My Mother always made sure I would have something red to wear, a candle and playing cards for Christmas. And I am here to tell the story, so obviously the Christmas Cat never ate me.
It is not enough that in Iceland adults had to worry whether their Christmas dinner would be delayed or stolen. Whether they and their animals would be scared out of their whits by the pranksters, whose progress we have been following here, the Jólasveinar. Their children had to deal with the Christmas Cat, Grýla and Leppalúði who had a huge appetite for naughty children.
Now, the Jólasveinar have become generous benefactors to good children. They each leave them a gift in their shoe as they arrive. If the Children have been naughty they will get a potato in their shoe instead of a gift. They are still up to the tricks that their name conveys , however, they never forget to leave something in the children’s shoes.
Not a bad life, I would say, for the modern Icelandic Children, who get a present in their shoe for 13 days, before Christmas. Furthermore there have been no reports of children having been eaten by the Jólaköttur, Grýla or Leppalúði, instead one hears an occasional report, that someone found the dreaded potato in their shoe.
