(By Jeremy Stahl. Slate.com, 22 December 2014)
Nothing
says Christmas like Donald Duck … if you’re Swedish. Every culture has its own
holiday customs, and Jeremy Stahl, a non-Swede and a “partially
lapsed Jew,” stumbled upon an odd one during a trip to Sweden. In the article
reprinted below, Stahl explains the Christmas cartoon tradition.
Three years ago, I went to Sweden with my then-girlfriend
(now wife), to meet her family and celebrate my first Christmas. As an only
partially lapsed Jew, I was not well-versed in Christmas traditions, and I was
completely ignorant of Swedish customs and culture. So I was prepared for
surprises. I was not prepared for this: Every year on Dec. 24 at 3 p.m., half
of Sweden sits down in front of the television for a family viewing of the 1958
Walt Disney Presents Christmas special, "From All of Us to
All of You." Or as it is known in Sverige,
Kalle Anka och hans vänner önskar God Jul: "Donald Duck and his
friends wish you a Merry Christmas."
Kalle Anka, for short, has been airing without
commercial interruption at the same time on Sweden's main public-television
channel, TV1, on Christmas Eve (when Swedes traditionally celebrate the
holiday) since 1959. The show consists of Jiminy Cricket presenting about a
dozen Disney cartoons from the '30s, '40s, '50s, and '60s, only a couple of
which have anything to do with Christmas. There are "Silly
Symphonies" shorts and clips from films like Cinderella, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and The Jungle
Book. The special is pretty much the same every year, except for
the live introduction by a host (who plays the role of Walt Disney from the
original Walt Disney Presents series) and the annual addition of one new
snippet from the latest Disney-produced movie, which TV1's parent network, SVT,
is contractually obligated by Disney to air.
Kalle Anka is typically one of the three most popular
television events of the year, with between 40 and 50 percent of the country
tuning in to watch. In 2008, the show had its lowest ratings in more than 15
years but was still taken in by 36 percent of the viewing public, some
3,213,000 people. Lines of dialogue from the cartoons have entered common
Swedish parlance. Stockholm's Nordic Museum
has a display in honor of the show in an exhibit titled "Traditions."Each time the network has attempted to
cancel or alter the show, public backlash has been swift and fierce.
Kalle Anka (pronounced kah-lay ahn-kah) gets
its name from the star of the show's second animated short, a 1944 cartoon
called "Clown of the Jungle," in which Donald Duck is tormented by a
demented Aracuan Bird during a luckless ornithological expedition.
The short is typical of the random violence of many early Disney cartoons. The sadistic Aracuan (regularly
mistaken in Sweden for Hacke Hackspett, or Woody Woodpecker) sprays Kalle with seltzer,
bashes his head in with a mallet, blows him up with an exploding cigar,
threatens to kill himself simultaneously by hanging and gunshot, and ultimately
drives the infuriated Kalle insane.
Watching Kalle Anka for the first time, I was taken
aback not only by the datedness of the clips (and the somewhat random dubbing)
but also by how seriously my adoptive Swedish family took the show. Nobody
talked, except to recite favorite lines along with the characters. My
soon-to-be father-in-law, a burly man built like a Scandinavian spruce, laughed at jokes he had obviously
heard scores of times before. Nobody blinked at the antiquated animation, the
cheesiness of the stories, or even the good-old-fashioned '30s-era Disney-style racism. (In the 1932 "Silly Symphonies"
short "Santa's Workshop," there is a scene involving a black
doll who yells "Mammy" at the sight of Santa Claus then moons the
screen. It was eventually censored from the American version of the cartoon but
remains in Kalle Anka.)
The show's cultural significance cannot
be overstated.*
You do not tape or DVR Kalle Anka for later viewing. You do not eat or
prepare dinner while watching Kalle Anka. Age does not matter—every
member of the family is expected to sit quietly together and watch a program
that generations of Swedes have been watching for 50 years. Most families plan
their entire Christmas around Kalle Anka, from the Smörgåsbord
at lunch to the post-Kalle visit from Jultomten. "At 3 o'clock in the afternoon, you can't
to do anything else, because Sweden is closed," Lena Kättström Höök, a
curator at the Nordic Museum who manages the "Traditions" exhibit,
told me. "So even if you don't want to watch it yourself, you can't call anyone
else or do anything else, because no one will do it with you." To Kättström Höök, Sweden's affection for Kalle Anka
is tied up with older holiday traditions. "It's the dream of the old
peasant village before people moved to towns," she said. "Kalle Anka
is almost like gathering around the fire in old times and listening to fairy
tales."
But how did these tales become part of Sweden's
folklore? It was largely an accident of history, specifically the history of
television in Sweden. The show first aired in 1959, when Swedes were just
starting to own televisions. "You couldn't have done this in 1970,"
said Charlotte Hagström, an ethnology professor at Lund University and
archivist of the university's Folk Life Archives. "It had to be 1960 when
television was new." The fact that there was only one channel in Sweden
until 1969 and only two—both public-service stations run by Sweden's equivalent
of the BBC—until 1987 helped, too. As did the fact that, for years, Christmas
was the only time when Swedes could see Disney animation—or any American
cartoons—on television.
Over the last half-century, the characters and sketches have
become as much a part of the holiday as the Christmas tree, so much so that
each time TV1 has suggested modifying the schedule, public outcry has forced
the network to back down. In the 1970s, Helena Sandblad, then head of
children's programming, attempted to pull the show off of the air because
broadcasting a Disney program didn't jibe with the prevailing political ethos.
"Everything was pretty serious in the '70s and anything that was
commercial, or considered commercial, was not good, was considered an ugly
word," said SVT publicity officer Ursula Haegerström. After newspapers got
wind of the plans to cancel the show, the station was bombarded with letters,
phone calls, and negative press. Sandblad received personal threats. "That
was one of the worst audience storms in our history," Haegerström told me.
SVT ultimately gave in, and Kalle was saved. In 1982, the
network made the seemingly innocuous decision to replace one of the special's
most beloved cartoons, the 1938 Oscar-winning short "Ferdinand the Bull,"
with "The
Ugly Duckling." Again newspapers picked up the story and public outcry
ensued. Munro Leaf's famous tale of a bull who would rather smell
flowers than fight in a Spanish coliseum was touted by leftists during the Spanish Civil War and World
War II as a parable of pacifism. That the message resonates with a nation
defined by a centuries-long policy of neutrality
shouldn't come as a big surprise. Since 1983, when Ferdinand was
returned to its rightful place in the lineup, the program has remained largely
unaltered.
Kalle Anke and Friends has made national icons out of
its cartoon characters—Kalle, Ferdinand, Piff och Puff (Chip and Dale), Musse
Pigg (Mickey Mouse), Långben (Goofy), Pluto—but also its Swedish stars. Arne
Weise, who hosted the show live from 1972 to 2002, personified Christmas to two
generations of Swedes. In 1992, when he attempted to get the network to record
his portion of the program in advance so that he could spend Christmas with his
family, newspapers got a hold of the story and helped scuttle the change.
"We had recorded everything, but no way," SVT's Haegerström said.
"[The] host was supposed to sit there in some sort of vigil over
Christmas."
Weise claims that Sweden's stubborn insistence that he
record live every year destroyed his personal life, blaming the show for his
three divorces. "I wasn't easy to live with—I was in a bad mood out of
nervousness before going on air, and tired afterwards. That doesn't help to
make you a good father or lover," he told the newspaper Aftonbladet
in 2007. During his final taping of the show, in 2002, Weise—whose history of
alcohol problems is well-known to Swedes—claimed to have been "high as a
kite" on the morphine pills he was taking at the time for psoriasis. The
other popular national figure to emerge from the program is Bengt Feldreich,
the Swedish voice of Jiminy Cricket and narrator of much of the program.
Feldreich, a Swedish television reporter who built his name interviewing Nobel
Laureates for SVT's news division, is now most famous for his impromptu
rendition of "When You Wish Upon a Star" during the original taping
of the show.
Lund University's Hagström faced her own Kalle Anka
backlash in 2004 when she gave an interview to the Swedish news agency TT,
suggesting that the widespread popularity of DVDs and cable television had
changed the meaning of Kalle Anka for younger Swedes. The Swedish media
sensationalized the story. The headline in the popular tabloid Expressen
read "Is Kalle Anka on His Way out of Christmas?" Critical comments
soon flooded online messageboards. But the next generation of Swedes may not
quite have the same dedication to the special. Despite the consistently strong
ratings, SVT's Haegerström could not predict how much longer Kalle Anka
will last as a national institution. "I think that we will probably hang
in there for a few more years at least. I see my grandchildren, you know,
they're not as attached to it as their parents," she told me.For the time being, though, Kalle Anka is safe. Sweden's staunch defense of Kalle against all attackers, perceived and real, suggests an affection that has long since transcended the circumstances that first made it popular. For many Swedes, there is something comforting about knowing that every year there is one hour, on one day, when you sit down with everyone in your family and just be together. "People always want to change everything, and make everything new," Feldreich, Sweden's Jiminy Cricket, told the Swedish newspaper Länstidningen in 2008. "And then, like in a fairy tale from when we were kids, there's something familiar." Kalle Anka, he said, "offers security in a confusing world."
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