Kjellhamn has forty-one houses, one cobbled square and one Christmas tree, and the tree is forty-one feet tall. I measured it at dusk with a plumb line dropped from the church roof, and it came to forty-one feet and two inches, the two inches being the star. Every house on the harbor street is painted ox-red with white window frames and hung with a wreath and a big red bow, and every roof is thick with snow. Between the eaves, arcs of colored lights cross the street. The place looks like the inside of a music box, and about as often as not it sounds like one.
I asked three people how the town came to be this way, and I set their answers side by side. Anja Vik is the string-keeper, a trade that exists only because of Kjellhamn: each year on the first Saturday of December she climbs every roof ridge in the town to hang sixty-two arcs of lights, in one day, with a ladder, a thermos and a boy to hold the ladder. She says the lights are the whole point, because a town that is dark in December is only a town. Anders Dahl, the baker, says the point is the tree, a living spruce planted in 1870 and decorated in place, never cut, and that the star is lit by the first child to arrive in the square on Christmas Eve, a rule that has made the square very crowded at four in the afternoon. He bakes gingerbread for all of them, forty-one trays of it, one for each house.
The third account came from Astrid, who is nine. She says the lights do not need Anja, and that they come on by themselves if you hum. I tested this in the square, humming a flat tune for two minutes, and the lights came on at the end of the second minute, which Anja pointed out is when the lamplighter's timer clicks. Astrid was unmoved. Taken together, the three accounts agree on one thing, which is that nobody in Kjellhamn would live anywhere else in December. The small boats in the harbor are strung with lanterns and hung with wreaths, and on the black water they make a second town upside down.
I left on the coast road at dusk, with a bag of gingerbread I had been given at Anders's door and another from the next door along. In the towns of Pelhov and Tarnice, where the road bends, there is nothing to see in the dark. But from the first bend I could still see the tree, and for a long time it was the last light there was.
- Classification
- Fishing town with a Christmas festival
- Habitat
- Fjord shore beneath spruce slopes
- Danger
- Minimal
- Size
- About forty houses around one square
- Activity
- Seasonal
- Realm
- Northern fjord country
- Binomial
- Pagus hiemalis
- Diet
- Gingerbread, rye bread, hot cider
- Temperament
- Hospitable, merry, quick to sing