Maura's Illuminated Manuscript

The weekend didn't exactly start auspiciously: circumflatulation SNAFUs, and the Tickler's tummy acting up before, during, and after a lovely Chinese dinner at Tai Tung. (Mm, sauteed squid & pea vines.) But after a night of treating the Tickler with unusual delicacy, we hit the Nordic Heritage Museum for "Julefest".

You may remember that the Tickler is the Viking queen who attacks my castle. (Oh noes!) She has a Norwegian name, and she looks Nordic. She also has a side to her that I'd never seen until yesterday: she's charmingly bananas for things Scandihoovian. That's right, my burlesque-dancing super freak of a girlfriend has a mile-wide Norwegian grandma streak. She was keen to watch the accordion and nyckelharpa* music, this time complete with dancing in traditional dress.

A note about the museum itself: I used to live about a block from the old museum, which was in a former elementary school in a quiet corner of Seattle's Ballard neighborhood. That museum seemed a little, well, sad to me with its mismatched, amateurish signs and old exhibits. I know I wasn't alone in that opinion.

Well, not anymore. As of a few years ago, the NHM has a spiffy, purpose-built museum at the western edge of Ballard's commercial district, i.e. 26th & Market. And yes, it has to be in Ballard, because that's historically been Seattle's most Nordic neighborhood**. The Tickler misses how everything for Julefest was all together in the old museum's parking lot, but the indoor space was pretty neat. It looks much more like a professional operation now. They had a few very old early Viking artifacts on loan from the University of Uppsala, which was nifty.

The metalheads outnumbered the black people. I saw no obvious Nazis; says the Tickler, Nordic people, as fetish objects of the Nazis, have been vocally trying to dissociate themselves from them. I have never seen so many Nordic-looking people in one place.

Yes, we tried the æbleskivers: they're basically spheres of fried pancake batter served with powdered sugar and jam. Not bad! I told the older Danish ladies cooking them, with their special pans and skewers, that I'm mostly English and therefore behind enemy lines; their response was that the Vikings got everywhere. So everyone's Nordic? And, of course, I took a sip of the Tickler's aquavit. You could have caraway flavor, which tastes like you're drinking a sandwich, or anise flavor, which is basically ouzo.

So do I recommend that for everybody? Wayell, maybe once if you're like me. If you're the Tickler, you go every year and get a membership.



*The bastard child of a violin and an autoharp. It has keys, so the player doesn't have to finger the strings individually. It's held at the waist, not under the chin.
**As the older Scandihoovians have died, been put in homes, or been bought out, Ballard has been gentrified even more heavily than the city as a whole, which is saying something. Somehow, though, people still drive like zombies there.