My husband’s father was a civilian working for the Air Force, so when he was a kid the family moved around a lot. He spent a big chunk of his childhood in a village in England called Fritwell. He told me that he lived there long enough that when they moved back to the United States, he had an English accent for a while until he managed to change it into the generic-American accent he has today.
This also means he grew up with English children’s popular culture, some of which is just not well known here on the other side of the pond. Some of his favorite books from when he was a kid were the ones about the Moomins.
The Moomins are a family of trolls that are the main characters in a series of children’s books by Swedish/Finnish author Tove Jansson. The are popular in Scandinavia, Britain, and pretty much all of the rest of Europe, but just never really hit it big in the United States. There’s even a Moomin theme park in Finland!
It’s a shame that they aren’t better known here, not only because I think they’re adorable, but I think they’d be especially good for Heathen kids. The stories have a definite Heathen feel to them, but I guess that’s to be expected since it seems to me like Scandinavians only adopted Christianity halfway anyway.
The books have been adapted into several different television shows, even a Japanese anime version which seems to be very popular (or at least very easy to find on YouTube), but our favorite version is the Polish stop-motion animation one, which fans refer to as “the fuzzy felt Moomins.”
Since Yule is starting this weekend, here are some seasonally appropriate episodes of the Moomin TV series. You see, Moomins usually hibernate during the winter, but one winter our main protagonist, Moonintroll, woke up and got to see what goes on during the winter.
Here’s where they woke up in time for Christmas, and Moominmama misunderstands what people are talking about when people say “Christmas is coming,” and thinks Christmas is a person.:
The Lady of the Cold, who sure looks like Skadhi to me:
The Winter Bonfire, built by the woodland creatures to welcome back the sun after the long, dark Scandinavian winter:
Each of these episodes corresponds to a chapter in one of the books. They seem like they’d make excellent bedtime stories for my daughter once she’s old enough to appreciate them.
A Heathen Naturalist 