Christmas Eve is a big occasion for the people of Iceland. During Christmas Holidays the Icelanders decorate their houses. Different sorts of lights and Santa gets noticed on the windows and balconies. Different kinds of foods are baked and beautiful Christmas trees are decorated with lights.
At the beginning of December maximum people of Iceland’s House of Christmas starts decoration with advent lights, Santa and other figures and many houses finish their complete decoration within the middle of the month. The Christmas tree, which is the coronating glory, gets decorated on St. Thorlakur's Day, which is on 23rd December. On Christmas Eve when Christmas is barged in at six' o clock by all the church bells of the land then the lights of the beautiful Christmas tree gets lighted for the first time traditionally. Every people of Iceland sits beside the glorious Christmas tree after dinner and distributes the presents.
Most of the people of Iceland remains busy for the first two weeks of December. Special and spicy cookies are baked by most of the families of Iceland. For offering guests every family puts up ten different kinds of cookies. A very old tradition of Iceland, which is the making of laufabraud, is also a part of Iceland's Christmas Eve. Another important part of this festive season is cleaning the houses, buying gifts and preparing traditional meals along with Christmas dinner during the holidays. On the Christmas Eve Of Iceland most of the people prefer eating pork/ ham or ptarmigan. The traditional dinner of Icelanders on Christmas Eve is hangikjöt which is the smoked lamb of Iceland. Almond pudding is the dessert taken on Christmas Eve. Before serving, almond is put into the pudding and the person who gets the almond portion receives a prize.
The Yule man starts arriving at farms and towns thirteen days before the Christmas Eve in Iceland. The Icelandic children hung their little shoes on their bedroom windows on the night before the arrival of Yule man. The reason behind this is that the children thought that if they behaved nicely then the Yule man while they are sleeping would put some gifts into their shoes, but if they didn't behave nicely then after waking up they might find a potato or nothing inside their shoes.
Christmas Eve is the greatest festival of Icelanders and they enjoy this festival a lot.
