Swedish Christmas Food

The social justice part of me acknowledges how so many have so little...the former cook and appreciative eater details the Jul table...what I find most interesting about Swedish Christmas food is how such a large portion of the population eats the same thing: hard to wrap your head around as an American where one of our blessings (and challenges) is our diversity.
So, before lunch on Christmas Eve Day (a three day holiday here, interesting for a secular nation), we headed down the icy road to a neighbor´s collection of cabins. They met us on the porch where we sipped glögg while watching the men (also interesting in a nation with a certain amount of equality between the sexes) hang sheaves of wheat and bird food among evergreen branches. Inside, we consumed cheese and Jansson´s Frästelse (potatoes, anchovies, milk/cream and of course, butter) and beer, cider or aquavit. Then it was home to watch Mickey Mouse & Donald Duck: great classic animation from the days before digital, the golden age of the fourties through the sixties.
Christmas Feast proper began at home around three in the afternoon, at sunset. Appetizers were more Jansson´s, boiled potatoes, herring, little hot dogs & meatballs. Moving along the protein chain, our entree featured ham surrounded by mashed potatoes,applesauce, red cabbage salad, rutabaga gratin and mercifully: a green salad. All this was washed down by Christmas beer, gooseberry cider, seltzer and Julmust (a special sweet cola). And before we could even stretch our legs by the fire, coffee arrived with butter cookies and chocolate mousse.
Twenty-four hours later, we continued keeping the cold & dark at bay with the traditional rice porridge sprinkled with cinnamon, sugar, butter & milk. Coffee cut the white and more sugar & wheat appeared in the form of gingerbread and butter cookies, saffron buns and a wonderful Finnish plum pastry that reminded me of the kolatchky my grandmother used to bake. By the time we waddled home, bright stars punctured the black sky like cunniform and the snow sparkled as magically as in those childhood cartoons.