The 13 little men of Christmas. Icelandic legend for children

Can you imagine that there is no Santa Claus? Can you imagine that there is ... 13? This is what happens in Iceland. There, the children receive the visit of 13 little men of Christmas. We tell you what this beautiful Christmas legend is for telling the children. Discover who are the 13 Christmas me

Can you imagine that there is no Santa Claus? Can you imagine that there is ... 13? This is what happens in Iceland. There, the children receive the visit of 13 little men of Christmas.

We tell you what this beautiful Christmas legend is for telling the children. Discover who are the 13 Christmas men who bring gifts to Icelandic children.

Icelandic Legend of the 13 Little Men of Christmas to Tell the Children

Legend has it that in Iceland they lived a long, long time ago, some very young boys called jólasveinarnir, who liked to play a lot of jokes on children, to the point of frightening them. All of them were brothers, children of an ogre, but each had a particularity. Of course, they loved to hide among rocks, snow or glaciers.

The children had real nightmares, and every time they saw one of these youngsters or dwarfs, they would run out and hide in their homes. The inhabitants of this place, angry with this attitude,decided to ask for help from the king or ruler of the place.

At first he did not listen to them, until the day when his own children were mocked by these little men. Fed up with this situation, he decided to punish them in this way: if they did not want to be banished for life from Iceland, they had to take a gift to each child, one day a year, as a reward for all the evil they had done to them. The little men, who were 13, agreed to take the gifts before December 25

. And since they were 13, Christmas would begin thirteen days before the 25th. Each one of them had to travel a long way to a child's house. But as they were still a little naughty, in addition to the present they also left a mischief. In addition, they decided that they would only leave gifts in the form of toys, books or candy to children who had behaved well. To those who had behaved badly, I would leave them ... a potato! As if that were not enough, they also agreed not to give up their naughty and mocking character. During those two weeks prior to December 25, hombre the little men would play jokes in each home.And because they are invisible, they could do it without dissimulation. Así And this is how, since then,

Icelandic children do not receive a visit from Santa Claus, but 13 Santa Claus or 13 little men who decide each Christmas if they will leave a gift or a potato at the foot of the Christmas tree in each home and that in passing spend some other joke to record that they passed through there.