Welcome to our new blog! Here, we'll be featuring new products arriving in the shop, some tips on how to care for our houseplants and showcasing seasonal flowers.
This week, we kick of with our latest arrival in the shop - the Christmas Nisse. Here is a little folklore info about these creatures:
In Scandinavian folklore, a "household spirit" responsible for the care and prosperity of a farm. A nisse was usually described as a short man (under four feet tall) wearing a red cap with a tassel.
While belief in guardian spirits is a very old tradition in Scandinavia, belief in nisser was prominent in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Denmark, southern Norway and southern Sweden. Many farms claimed to have their own nisse. The nisse took an active interest in the farm by performing chores such as grooming horses, carrying bales of hay, and other farm-related tasks. These chores were usually done much more efficiently and effectively than by their human counterparts.
However, nisser were very temperamental, to say the least. If the household was not careful to keep its nisse satisfied (usually in the form of a single bowl of porridge with butter in it left out on Christmas eve) the spirit could turn against its masters. In one story, a girl is instructed by her family to give the nisse his porridge, but decides to eat it herself. The nisse responds by forcing her to dance until she nearly dies. Sometimes the offering themselves could backfire: in another tale, a grateful farmer gives his nisse a pair of nice white boots, and afterward the nisse refuses to go out into the rain to stable the horses for fear of getting his new boots dirty. - Encyclopedia Mythica from Encyclopedia Mythica Online.
These little guys are very popular so come and grab yours soon to avoid disappointment!