Jolabokawhat? JOLABOKAFLOD! What a wonderful tradition! Jolabokaflod is celebrated in Iceland and it's honestly one of the best traditions I've ever heard of, it literally translates to "the Christmas book flood!" Every Christmas Eve people exchange books and read them together while eating chocolates! I loved the idea so much that we decided to adopt the tradition here in Hawai'i. We usually stay home for Christmas, but this year we ended up visiting family on a neighboring island so we chose to celebrate Jolobokaflod on New Year's day instead and it was wonderful.
I took the liberty of hunting down a book for everyone in my family, which I found exciting because not everyone loves reading for fun so it was my job to find a book that they would actually read and not use as a paper weight. I think I did a pretty good job, for example, my sister's boyfriend was gifted an interesting book titled Booze & Vinyl: A Spirited Guide to Great Music & Mixed Drinks (he loves music and mixed drinks lol) and the cover was beautiful, I got an excited thumbs up from him so YAY! For some, I also added a book for writing, a few of us are authors and I thought it could be fun to have a book for reflecting and just turning the old writing gears, not to mention writing can be very therapeutic. My dad wants to eventually write a memoir so I got him a book that asks questions about his life, hoping it might stir some content. My sister Summer is a great cook and had talked about eventually writing a recipe book, so that's what she got, along with a book called the Green Witch, since she's also a talented green thumb.
After we opened our books, we sat around and read and wrote and ate chocolates and drank hot cocoa, (some of us added in some Bailey's to our drinks) it was a merry time! I'm so happy that we started this publishing company, it has already inspired us to do so many fun, new things as a family. Next year we decided to change it up a bit and we are doing a secret Santa book exchange instead. I'm a little bummed since I loved the book hunt, but I'll gladly share the joy. We will also be saying goodbye to our beautiful book tree this week, she has given us so much joy this Christmas. We will be sure to make a list of memorable books we read this year to add to our tree next time around. Remember, the goal is to eventually have ONLY book ornaments lol it'll be fun to keep adding books until there's no room for actual Christmas ornaments.
Wishing every one a Happy New Year, or as we say in Hawai'i, Hau'oli Makahiki Hou!!
Click here to check out our Jolobokaflod reel!