On 13 December, processions in white gowns walk into schools, churches and town squares across Sweden, led by a Lucia wearing a crown of candles and singing of light returning to the dark — followed by saffron buns and mulled wine.

The bearer of light

Across Sweden, Lucia processions are performed by children’s groups, youth choirs and adult choirs, from keen amateurs to professionals, all dressed in white full-length gowns. Tradition says that Lucia wears “light in her hair”, which today usually means a wreath with electric candles on her head, and each of her handmaidens carries a candle too. The star boys, also in white, carry stars on sticks and wear tall paper cones on their heads, and Christmas elves with small lanterns bring up the rear.

The songs share one theme: the triumph of light over darkness as Lucia appears. The best known, which almost every Swede knows by heart, usually accompanies the procession in and out, beginning with the night treading heavily around yards and dwellings until Saint Lucia comes bearing lighted candles.

Saint and folk belief

The Swedish Lucia custom appears to blend several traditions: the martyr Saint Lucia of Syracuse, who died in 304, and a Swedish legend of Lucia as Adam’s first wife. In the old almanac, Lucia Night was the longest of the year, a dangerous night when supernatural beings were abroad and animals could speak. People were urged to eat seven or nine hearty breakfasts, the last to rise was teased as “Lusse the Louse”, and in agrarian Sweden young people dressed up as Lucia figures and went from house to house singing and asking for food and schnapps.

The first recorded white-clad Lucia appeared in a country house in 1764, but the custom only became popular throughout Swedish society in the 1900s, when schools and local associations promoted it as a calmer celebration than the rowdy carousing of the past. Stockholm proclaimed its first Lucia in 1927.