Posted on 03/15/2024 7:37:19 AM PDT by Rev M. Bresciani
DON’T TALK TO ME ABOUT PRIVILEGE. We’ve all been dissed in one way or another. My dad and I were sitting at the counter. It’s a Norwegian town, or was. The guy sitting next to my dad was chatting with us, and after awhile he asked what our last name was. My dad said “Dahlgren.” The guy paused and then says:
“Is that Swede or Norwegian?” My dad said Swede. The guy stared at his coffee, and after a longer pause, he says:
“Well, there are some good Swedes.” We laughed, but he was dead serious.
(Excerpt) Read more at new.americanprophet.org ...
Sweden and Norway (Denmark too) have had a contentious history, one invading the other and occupying them at various times. Just because it happened hundreds of years ago doesn’t mean its been forgotten.
And they make some mighty fine meatballs.
Have them with mashed potatoes and gravy on a cold night.
The town I grew up in had a Norwegian-Swede divide, which also had an actual geographic component to it. I was a little kid when we moved there, and thought there was no difference until I was corrected by some grownups. I found this hilarious because - to a young outsider - these people could not be distinguished from one another except on Sunday mornings prior to about 1980.* The Anglos, Germans and Dutch considered the lot of them to be “Scandis,” which outraged Swede and Norsky (and probably the Danes) equally.
*In the mid-1970s, the “Swedish” church started to soft-pedal the Gospel and crank up touchy-feely, social issue humanism. Many fled to join the “Norwegian” church. Integration ensued, and now nobody under 65 wants to eat either lutefisk OR lutfisk.
Are there any Swedish bachelor farmers? Garrison Keillor used to talk about Norwegian bachelor farmers of Lake Wobegon.
Are they pining for the fjords?
I’m 1/2 Swedish so I suppose that makes me only half bad...
And knives....
She looks like an old girlfriend of mine: Gerghen Kerhgen from across the fjord in Svedeland...She built the beaver damn....
At least it’s different countries. In Ireland you need to be from the “right” county or you are the enemy.
Swedes, Norwegians, Germans, whatever... there were still lots of bachelor farmers back in those days, but there were less of them as time went by. Fewer small family farms, smaller farm families, better jobs and more social mixing in towns, and more mechanized farming all contributed to that trend.
In Germany they have "East Frisian" jokes (or at least did at one time). In North Carolina they have Wolfpack (N.C. State University) jokes.
My dad grew up in a small Minnesota farming community with a town of a couple hundred people. The town had (still has) a Norwegian Lutheran church and a Swedish Lutheran church. Dad always said the two churches could never join together: “The Sweeds sing two hymns, and the Norwegians sing three. There’s just no way to compromise.”
I’ll admit, though, last fall for my aunt’s 100th birthday party, she invited the whole town, including the Sweeds.
We used to live not far from a town that had one Catholic church for the Irish, and another Catholic church for the Germans. For about a hundred years they were bitter rivals and wanted nothing to do with one another.
Well, what with the availability of the automobile, changing mores, etc, the young men and women surreptitiously intermingled and otherwise did what came naturally to young men and women... you might say they "compromised."
These great compromisers eventually cranked out enough enough Patrick Schmidts and Gretchen Shaughnesseys to let the diocese combine the parishes.
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