Nordic Buns

A happy slappy history

When I book a vacation, I often try to plan around festivals, eccentric events, even moon cycles and off-path oddities worth a detour.

Such as my road trip to White Sands, New Mexico that very much depended on the fullest of moons to blur the boundary between sand and sky. While organizing an August trip to an island off the coast of Mexico in bioluminescence season, the goal was getting as far away from the full moon at the end of the week as possible. A new moon would be preferable to have the darkest night sky possible—all the better to see the glowing underwater creatures with—but we’d have to make do only days away from full. Still the tiny marine algae iridescing in the funky muck were truly tiny amaze-balls.

For this current adventure, I looked at the calendar for winter dates when the Northern Lights (my lifelong quest to finally really witness) might be at their peak in Iceland and Denmark and discovered the week of my daughters’ second winter break in February also happened to hold all kinds of weird nordic treats we wouldn’t want to miss, though still only somewhat tangentially.

In Iceland, the time leading up to Easter includes the odd day known as Cream Bun Day or Bun Day, Bolludagur, observed this year on Monday, Feb. 16, 2026, a holiday when…wait for it…children earn these baked treats when they spank their parents. Yup, buns for buns. Atlas Obscura writes:

Once a year, Icelandic kids receive or fashion a wooden stick with a paper decoration on one end. Then, they try to spank their parents with it, yelling “bolla, bolla, bolla!” (“bun, bun, bun!”) as they go. In return, adults reward children with choux pastries, stuffed with cream and jam, and topped with powdered sugar or chocolate. Every successful spank earns another pastry bun—at least, on Bolludagur, or “Bun Day,” it does.

Cream bun, Maria Eklind, CC BY-SA 2.0

This sweet and suspicious event has happened the Monday before Ash Wednesday since the early 1900s. In a country of <350,000 humans, the per capita bun ratio for the holiday is staggering. Bakers prepare over one million sweet buns, which makes that almost 3:1 buns per person, not counting us tourists and not to mention all the secret baking that might take place at home to supplement this artery-clogging flogging affair.

Deceptively pagan Christians just love to indulge before the sacrifices of the Lent season, marked by Ash Wednesday. We have, for instance, Fat Tuesday, or Mardi Gras when you indulge (show your tits?) before the 40-day period of fasting and penitence begins.

Or in Iceland, bun bun bun, which I guess will take place as we skedaddle to the airport and fly our tired asses to Denmark for the second leg of our tour. We will find some pastry en route—or else!—and my sugar-sticky teens will surely delight in the sanctioned slapping of their poor frazzled momster.

Then it’s time for further WTF fun in Denmark since we land on the very same day that is known as Fastelavn there, which also has a history of flogging and buns and… throws in some reluctant cats for good measure. From Scandinavian Standard,

The main tradition associated with the holiday was the placing of a black cat in a barrel and beating the barrel with fastelavnsris (this can be anything from a stick or a club or a bunch of twigs) until it broke apart, releasing the (probably traumatized) cat. This was done to ward off evil.

Knocking the cat out of the barrel - Fastelavn in Denmark, 1872

This sanctioned black cat abuse doesn’t happen anymore and was, luckily, never that popular. Before cat-in-barrel beating it was an 18th century Good Friday tradition to flog children “to remind [them] of the pains of Christ on the cross.” Before cats and kids, it was traditional to beat infertile or young women, “as the Good Friday flogging ritual seems to have been conflated with a similar fertility ritual.” Hmm, great. Then, in comes the tradition we are now acclimated to from our raw Icelandic heinies—wherein another version of Fastlavn involves kids waking their parents by hitting them for pastry. If my kids slap me, I don’t usually dispense pastry, but whatever. The cat motif pervades, if only in the decor:

Luckily, our flogging days are behind us and we now just fill a barrel with candy like a piñata. Children dress up and, at neighborhood and/or school events, hit the barrel with bats until it cracks open and spills the candy. The barrel often still has an image of a cat on it; the person who breaks open the barrel is “Queen of the Cats,” (kattedronning) while the person who breaks the bottom of the barrel is “King of the Cats” (kattekonge). In the past, the title came with a year of tax exemption (uhhh what). The candy is then divided up equally among the children.

See how nice and egalitarian everyone is here in these Scandinavian parts?

In addition to the breaking of the barrel, children dress in costume and go “rattling,” (the only way I can translate this word, which in Danish is raslen) where they sing songs door-to-door and beg for candy, buns or money. If they don’t get what they’re after, the threat of mischief comes at the end of the song:

Buns I want.
If I get no buns
I will make trouble.

Will my girls sing for candy in a foreign land? Probably not. Will they slap my bum (when no one’s looking) for a pastry? Most definitely.

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