It doesn't sit in the pantheon of prominent immigrant holiday traditions that fall on some day other than Dec. 25 (think Jan. 6 – not that Jan. 6 – for many Latinos and Armenians). And you won't find any schools extending their winter breaks by a week to accommodate it.
But if there's one thing you should know about the Scandinavian tradition of St. Lucia’s Day and its more pagan cousin Lussinatt, both observed on Dec. 13, it's that they take place in darkness. And that's kind of the point.
I grew up hearing stories about these rituals, and I’ve tended to take them for granted. But not this year. At the end of 2025, the insistence of my Norwegian forebears on celebrating light in the frigid depth of Scandinavian darkness carries a special, hopeful resonance.
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That centrality of darkness really, ah, shined through at the St. Lucia church service I attended at California Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks earlier this month. With the pews packed, the ceremony started with the house lights out, leaving only the intruding glow of "EXIT" signs and smartphone screens. A procession of robed candle-bearers entered singing the stirring "Sankta Lucia" hymn in Swedish, led by a Finnish student wearing a century-old tin crown with, by my count, seven lit candles.
With nothing but the solitary light of St. Lucia's crown to hold our attention, the significance was clear: "We pause in the midst of winter's darkness to celebrate light, hope and community," said the Rev. Elizabeth Gallen, Cal Lutheran's campus pastor, after the opening procession.
St. Lucia's Day commemorates a fourth-century Italian martyr said to have brought food – and light – to persecuted Roman Christians hiding underground. It's a story with obvious resonance for Christians – Lutherans, mainly – in Norway, Sweden and Denmark, where winters bring extremely long, often depressing nights.
“Californians don’t get that,” said Karen Darnall, the vice president of the Scandinavian American Cultural and Historical Assn., which has organized the Cal Lutheran St. Lucia service since 2023. Here, she noted, the sun still dominates winter days, compared with its disappearing act the closer you get to the Arctic Circle. In Nordic countries, celebrating St. Lucia serves the practical purpose of coping with seasonal darkness.
Paul Thornton
So does the conspicuously less Christian custom Lussinatt, also observed on Dec. 13, a day the old Julian calendar marked as the winter solstice. I grew up more familiar with this tradition, if only because I preferred the stories told by my maternal grandmother (mor mor in Norwegian) to what seemed like just another church service.
The way Mor mor told it, evil spirits and trolls (and troll figurines, as if to up the ante, were always plentiful in our house) roamed freely on the longest night of the year. For reasons that never made much sense to me, it was believed that farm animals could talk to each other that night. It was a battle between the solstice's darkness and the advancing light of the days ahead, and safety could be found only in the light you made indoors.
Asked about Norwegian trolls and other nods to pagan customs, Darnell told me she’d like to bring “more of that” into future services.
Oscar Garza
However culturally accommodating events become, both Lussinatt and St. Lucia's Day look at darkness and say: Nope. Your mileage may vary on what that means. For some, it may be a matter of purely personal soul-searching; for others, just a lovely if quaint ritual. At Cal Lutheran, I saw it a little differently.
During the service, when the woman representing St. Lucia sang a Finnish hymn of longing for her homeland, I thought of Ukrainians who hear the melody they loaned to “Carol of the Bells” and pray for their homeland’s survival. When “Silent Night” was sung in Norwegian, I felt embarrassed to descend from one of the few migrant groups favored by an American president who terrorizes Somalis, Latinos and others.
Acknowledge the darkness, but defy it and create light – that’s a worthy holiday message indeed, whether it comes from a Christian tradition embraced all over Scandinavia, or pagan folklore passed down from tiny fjord-side villages in Norway to my childhood home in Glendale.
