A build-it-yourself, wire-it-yourself, modular dollhouse toy for encouraging little girls to play more in the realm of engineering, math, science, and architecture from an early age. Found thanks to the wonders of Pinterest.
Yes! I had some Swedish trinkets, worthless to anyone but family, that my grandmother hoarded. She used to drive with my mom to Solvang (a tiny Swedish tourist town) nearly 100 miles for the St. Lucia celebration. And she treasured the few words of Swedish she knew, and the one or two songs she had been taught as a kid. They really did revere the old land--and when she finally traveled to Sweden in her sixties to visit the relatives now several generations removed, it was like Old Home Week, apparently.
Oh, I know Solvang -- we spent our wedding night there, as it happens -- not least because it's the nearest 'big' town to the boarding school where Hal attended high school. (The nearest town, full stop, is Los Olivos, though perhaps the biggest 'landmark' these days is Michael Jackson's Neverland Ranch, which he built just across the road from Midland when the Bones family sold their ranch.)
And I sympathize with Swedish nostalgia for the motherland -- I have my share of little Dala horses, and my share of reverence for Falu-red cottages with white gingerbread trim -- but what's mystical about it to me is that it appears in people who have never once in their lives set foot in Sweden. Me, I was born there, speak the language, have fond childhood memories of the specific ways holidays are celebrated there, and was taken from a fairly idyllic, pastoral childhood in small-town Sweden and dumped into the California suburbs at an impressionable age, so I figure my nostalgia makes a certain amount of sense. I don't understand how that manages to survive two and three generations down the line.
I strongly suspect it's the idyllic stories handed down, in opposition to the grim hard work of a farm (especially a farm run entirely by women, who have to do all the staggering amounts of manual labor themselves.) My grandmother thought the height of riches was an indoor toilet at the end of the hall of single apartments, when she was in her twenties.
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Date: 2012-06-20 10:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-20 10:58 pm (UTC)And I sympathize with Swedish nostalgia for the motherland -- I have my share of little Dala horses, and my share of reverence for Falu-red cottages with white gingerbread trim -- but what's mystical about it to me is that it appears in people who have never once in their lives set foot in Sweden. Me, I was born there, speak the language, have fond childhood memories of the specific ways holidays are celebrated there, and was taken from a fairly idyllic, pastoral childhood in small-town Sweden and dumped into the California suburbs at an impressionable age, so I figure my nostalgia makes a certain amount of sense. I don't understand how that manages to survive two and three generations down the line.
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Date: 2012-06-20 11:48 pm (UTC)