Tonight, because it’s not Christmas without a few hymns from Sissel, we have Glade Jul, the Norwegian version of “Silent Night.”

The Norwegian translation does an interesting thing with the lyrics. It pulls the whole story into the present – or pulls us into the past, back to the first Christmas. The Norwegian lines of the first verse go (more or less, my translation):

Happy Christmas, Holy Christmas. 
Angels descend unseen. 
Hither they fly, with leaves of Paradise, 
Where they behold what God has accomplished. 
Secretly they walk among us; 
Secretly they walk among us.

Tonight, like last night, I’m recycling old material. DON’T JUDGE ME! I’m coming down with a cold.

No, wait. Nowadays what we say is, “I’m coming down with a cold, I hope.”

Feels like a cold, anyway. First time I’ve gotten sick in quite a while. I think I got through the whole pandemic thing without a day in bed.

Anyway, I know I’ve posted this before – sometime. But this is Sissel Kyrkjebø just as she was becoming a celebrity in Norway. About the time she released her Christmas album, also called “Glade Jul,” (the Norwegian version of “Silent Night”). Pretty much everybody in the country bought a copy. Plus at least one lovestruck American guy living in Florida at the time.

This really is a gem of a performance.

It’s a Christmas miracle... sort of. You know how the movie “White Christmas” goes, when they’re all in the ski lodge, hoping/praying for snow so they can save the business, and they get a big snowfall on Christmas Eve? That happened here, in the magic wonderland of Minnesota. We’d gotten some snow early this winter, but a long stretch of warm temperatures and dry weather left all nature naked and ashamed. But last night the blizzard came in pure Hollywood style, depositing 8 or 9 inches, I guess. Today you could film a Hallmark special here. Something for the kids, anyway. If they have to remember a premature year without the grandparents, they’ll at least have memories of sliding and snowballs. And, of course, of delayed presents because the Post Office is backed up like the Donner Party.

As you no doubt deduced, the video above is the one and only Sissel, singing “Glade Jul,” which is the Norwegian version of Silent Night. Pretty much the same idea in the lyrics, except that we replaced the words for “Silent Night” with ones for “Happy Christmas.” Because we could.

And Glade Jul to you, too.

I’m between book reviews tonight, so I thought, “Hey, I can post Christmas videos now.” And what do I discover on YouTube, but a Sissel video I haven’t seen before? This one’s a treasure, because it shows her just when she was beginning to be famous in Norway. You’ll recognize the song as “Silent Night,” as they sing it over there. “Glade Jul” means “Happy Christmas.”

This is the young Sissel I modeled the character of Halla after, in The Year of the Warrior.