Iceland has the coolest Christmas tradition

The Christmas gift-giving season can be a stressful time.

Choosing gifts that you think your friends and loved ones will enjoy, appreciate, and, importantly, actually?use?is a delicate task that can test your patience and sanity. So much time, money, and emotional energy is poured into buying stuff that often goes unused, is passed on to someone else, or just gets discarded.

The folks in Iceland seem to have solved this problem with a very different holiday gift-giving tradition. Rather than obsess over exchanging things, they give each other more entertaining, more intellectually stimulating, more emotionally enriching items: books.

Icelanders’ love of books has earned them a global reputation as being a country of bookaholics. A?study conducted by Bifr?st University in 2013 ?found that half the country’s population read at least eight books a year. In 2009, Icelanders borrowed 1.2 million books from the Reykjavík City Library—in a city of only 200,000 people.

With just over 330,000 inhabitants, the total number of books published each year in Iceland is far smaller than most other nations. But on a per capita basis, Iceland publishes more books than any other country in the world, with five titles published for every 1,000 Icelanders, according to?NPR .

Icelanders’ devotion to reading is most evident in a remarkable tradition they observe: Between September and November, publishers launch a book publishing tsunami known as the?Jolabokaflod, which in English translates roughly into the “Christmas Book Flood.”

The annual Book Flood kicks-off with the printing of the?Bokatidindi,?a catalog of new publications distributed free to every Icelandic home, courtesy of the Iceland Publishers Association. On Christmas eve, Icelanders exchange books as gifts and then spend the night reading them, often while drinking hot chocolate or alcohol-free Christmas ale called?jólabland . “The culture of giving books as presents is very deeply rooted in how families perceive Christmas as a holiday,” Kristjan B. Jonasson, president of the Iceland Publishers Association, told?NPR .

Jolabokaflod, according to?The Reykjavik Grapevine’s Hildur Knutsdottir, dates to World War II, when strict currency restrictions limited imports of most gift-making materials and products—with the exception of paper. “The restrictions on imported paper were more lenient than on other products, so the book emerged as the Christmas present of choice. And Icelanders have honored the tradition ever since,” Knutsdottir writes.

In this age of one-click shopping and next-day delivery of stuff that often has little enduring value or purpose, that adds to consumers’ financial burdens, and which eventually ends up in a landfill somewhere, the concept behind?Jolabokaflod?is incredibly simple and appealing.

What do you think about this Christmas tradition? Share your thoughts in the comments.

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Merry Christmas to my friends on LinkedIn who celebrate!