i legally cannot tell you to burn this goat
that being said,
You may not agree with the whole of the American Constitution; the second bit in particular tends to be a little divisive. But whether you’re left wing or right or an adherent of some deeply esoteric political philosophy that only exists on Twitter, all Americans are gifted by God or one of the lesser archons with the right to Free Speech™. I am writing this from Germany, where we don’t have that, and as a result I cannot legally tell you to burn down this Swedish goat.
According to my Substack analytics no one ever clicks any of the links I post in here, so I will explain the goat. It is a goat made of straw. It is called the Gävle Goat because it lives in Gävle, which apparently is somewhere in Sweden. It is something like forty feet tall and every year — every single year, for reasons no one can explain — everyone tries to burn it down.
Let’s take a step back. The Swedes have a thing called the Yule Goat, which is a goat made out of straw and which might be vaguely pagan. It is surprisingly hard to research the Yule Goat, because most of what’s been written about it relates to the Gävle Goat, which as I have indicated is famous due to repeated arsons both succesful and attempted. I can’t find much academic scholarship on the Yule Goat itself, and most of the popular-oriented articles I can find just sort of assert that its “origins date back to ancient Pagan festivals,” which absent very rigorous research is a statement you should never, ever believe. There’s also a whole book on it I can’t read because I don’t read Swedish. Anyway, fine, Thor was in a chariot pulled by two goats, there was a goat who lived on the roof of Valhalla, something something Yule. Fine. It’s pagan. It doesn’t matter.
What matters is that in 1966 a Swedish businessman came up with the idea of building a really big Yule Goat in the middle of Gävle on the assumption that it would somehow make people spend money. It went up on December 2nd and lasted until December 31st, when someone burned it down.
They rebuilt it the next year, and the year after that, and everything was ok. After that came a twelve year period where it was destroyed every single year. It was burned four times, collapsed on its own twice, and once a guy somehow stole it. Twice people just ripped it apart. In 1976 someone rammed it with a Volvo. In ‘79 it was burned before they’d even finished building it. The town set up a replacement, which was also destroyed.
I am eliding some details here. In 1971 the association of bussinessmen stopped building the goat, presumably because God hated it. It was replaced by a smaller goat built by students, which was then serially destroyed for a decade. They still build the little goat, but in 1986 they started building the big one again, and they have been destroyed more often than not.
Like, really more often than not. Of the 56 years it’s been standing, it has survived only 19 times. (I am not counting this year, because that remains an open question.) It took fifty years for the goat to survive more than two years in a row (2017-2020).
In 2005, two guys dressed as Santa Claus and a gingerbread man burned the goat, allegedly by shooting it with flaming arrows. In 2010, someone tried to bribe a guard to look the other way while they stole the goat with a helicopter. One American guy was arrested after burning the goat and then just sort of standing around with a lighter in his hand. He told police his Swedish friends had informed him that goat arson was totally legal (it’s not, but it should be). He later claimed that there existed a secret society dedicated to burning down the goat, which — God, I hope that’s true.
Let me be clear: this is not a wink-wink-nudge-nudge “oh no don’t burn our goat ;)” kind of situation. The town really does not want you to burn their goat. If you are caught burning or attempting to burn the goat they will send you to Swedish prison, which I assume is nicer than my apartment. They’ve put various and escalating security measures in place, none of which have worked. In 2011 they covered it with a protective coating of ice; it melted and the goat burned. In 2013 they soaked it with flame-retardant chemicals, leading one Swedish website to run the headline “Gävle confident its 2013 Xmas goat won't burn.” It did.
This year there is a security fence, 24 hour spotlights, and I believe round-the-clock guards. There is also a livestream, where you can watch the goat not burn while listening to lofi Christmas music. Every day, six to nine times a day, I check the video feed to see if the goat is on fire. Every time it isn’t, and I curse the Lord in my heart.
No one has ever been able to explain why they’ve burned the goat. It just feels right. It feels demanded by Odin, the Hanged One, Lord of Ravens, Caller-down of the Gallows Dead.
As I said at the opening of this article, I cannot tell you to burn this goat, nor can I offer any suggestions on how you might do so. I will say that lots of drones are on sale at this time of year, and many are more than capable of carrying small incendiary devices.
EDIT: The goat has been largely devoured by birds, leaving its wooden skeleton exposed.
