Lucia

The name comes from the Latin lux, light. Saint Lucy was a young Christian woman from Syracuse in Sicily who was killed on 13 December 304. Her feast stayed in the calendar of saints and remained in the Swedish Catholic calendar until the 16th century.

Under the Julian calendar, the night of 13 December was the longest of the year. In rural belief it was a dangerous night: supernatural beings were about, animals could talk, and it was best to stay awake. Baking, threshing and brewing had to be finished by Lucia Day, which was marked with extra food and drink.

The modern form grew up in western Sweden, on the manor estates around Lake Vänern. The earliest record of a white-clad figure visiting people at dawn dates from 1764. The first known Lucia with candles on the head, in 1820, was a man: a farmhand at Skinnskatteberg.

In the early 1890s Artur Hazelius brought the custom to Skansen, the open-air museum in Stockholm, to show it as a rural tradition. In the late 1920s the newspaper Stockholms Dagblad held a competition to choose Stockholm's Lucia, with a public procession through the city. Other papers copied the idea and the custom spread across the country.

By the 1950s the procession was common throughout Sweden. By then Lucia had reached Finland, where she became a symbol for the Swedish-speaking minority, and Denmark, where she was taken up in 1944 as a silent protest against the German occupation.