January Blog

Pelle Forshed och Stefan Thungren’s skickligt tecknade Stockholmsnatt i Svenska Dagbladet har säkert höjt hip-faktorn och kanske sänkt åldern bland tidningsläsarna - så att de känner igen sig i serien om trendiga 30-åringar i huvudstaden.

Just back from a short holiday in Sweden, I can attest to the scene in the cartoon above playing out in many homes across the country. The parents are watching the Christmas television special Kalle Anka och hans vänner önskar God Jul while the children couldn’t care less.

The quirky tradition, that each year sees millions of Swedes hunkering down in front of their television sets at 3 pm sharp on December 24, is unique in the world.

Where else would a Disney program from 1958, with mostly antiquated film clips of Mickey Mouse, Snowwhite, Lady and the Tramp, Mowgli and Baloo, Robin Hood, Ferdinand the Bull and of course Donald Duck, Sweden's Kalle Anka, be an integral part of a national Christmas celebration.

I hadn't celebrated Christmas in Sweden for almost thirty years, and had only seen the Kalle Anka programme once during this time when the Silicon Vikings sent me a bootleg. So settling down in front of the television with much-loved relatives in a cozy cottage in Dalarna, I was thrilled to find everything in the Disney parade to be the same, with the exception of a couple of new clips as SVT is obliged to include something from a current Disney production. Bengt Feldreich still sings the Jiminy Cricket "Wishing upon a star", but the narration of the program is done by a current Christmas host. I missed the Chip and Dale clip, but loved Kalle Anka as an ornithologist trying to photograph the demented Araucan Bird.

When I was growing up in Stockholm, going to a Disney movie program at the Sture cinema on Birger Jarlsgatan was part of the Christmas holidays. So you can imagine what a thrill it was when we got a one-hour programme of favorites on our black-and-white television set for free in 1960! This was at a time when we only had one public service channel that did not run any animation features and that had a general disdain for the kind of commercialism that Disney represented.

There has been an outcry every time SVT has tried to scrap the program. But being the most watched television programme in Sweden (except for Melodifestivalen and certain sport cliff hangers) it remains a keeper.

That is, until the next generation takes over.