I never thought we had peculiar Christmas Traditions until the last few years when people would come into the house and ask why we decorated with trolls. It just sorta happened! LeGrand's mother's family came from Norway. LeGrand served his mission there and later returned many times as the scripture translation supervisor to help the Norwegian translation team with the new scripture revisions. Both during his mission and 30 years later going back with Translation, he collected trolls. The idea of trolls originated in Norway and storytellers and artists have enjoyed the tradition for centuries.
When the older kids were in college, they found a toy store that sold a specialty line of elves. Even though they had precious few pennies, they couldn't resist buying their dad a collection of elves that looked eerily similar to our trolls. From that point on, the trolls and elves came out together at Christmas.
As grandchildren were born, they were scared to death of the trolls. It made coming to Grandpa's during the holidays sort of scary and exciting. Grandpa would always gather the kids together and tell them stories about the funny little creatures which added to the whole mystic of Christmas with the Black Family.
Now, all the kids have become part of the Troll and Elves Christmas Stories as LeGrand weaves them into the tales. They love it almost as much as Grandpa!
All these stories begin with, ". . . . Once uponce a time. . . ."
No comments:
Post a Comment