#69 A FEW FINNISH HEIRLOOMS

                                                     LITTLE FINNISH TREASURES

    After Mom and her parents "escaped' from the Soviet Union in 1933, they spent a few months at her paternal grandmother's in Finland. Mom, age 12, attended school there and even taught English to her teacher. They brought a few items back to Canada and I have them now.

The ruble became the Russian currency in 1922. Taking Russian rubles out of Stalin's Russia was illegal, but Mom, a small 12 year old, smuggled out these rubles and also a revolver under her belt. That she was not searched was a miracle as the Russian border guards often cut open people's shoes looking for contraband.

A Finnish puukko knife has a round handle made of elegant birchwood or reindeer antler. It is never longer than 10 cm. It has a single, short, straight, sharp blade. It is a fundamental tool of Arctic life, an everyday tool used to carve feathered sticks for lighting a fire, gut a fish, as an ice pick, to cut through a rope, used for whittling It is considered a symbol of Finnish pride; receiving a puukko as a gift is considered an honour, the idea being that the presenter is thinking of the well-being of the recipient.

   

Family lore is that this beautiful leather fireplace bellows was handmade by a Finnish cousin.

This little hand-painted wooden doll always sat on Mom's kitchen window-sill. He dons a Four Winds hat, a traditional hat of the Sami (Laplanders). The hat is four-cornered to both represent the four corners of the earth, (which the early Sami believed to be square) and to symbolize the four directions of the wind. The north is for spiritual powers; the east is the new day and what it brings; the south is for strength and physical power; the west is history and the time of ancestors. The hat would be coloured bright blue (for the sky), and bright red and yellow. 

Karelian penannular brooch, a gift to Mom (Karelian horseshoe brooches circulated during the time of the Northern Karelian crusades (1050-1300 A.D.)

Aunt Helmi's vintage star necklace with the Finnish lion. The Finnish national coat of arms displays a crowned lion.

Grandpa Suomela's poetry: As a young immigrant to Canada, Grandpa Suomela worked in the lumber camps and later as a sailor. To pass the time, he wrote Finnish poetry in this red record book and the entries are dated from 1916 to 1921. His handwriting is very, very elegant. Most entries are from the logging camps, but other are from Bermuda, Seattle, Panama, New York and Italy.

Three spoons. One spoon is Grandpa Suomela's second place prize for a long-distance bicycle race. the other two spoons are from the S.S.Drottningholm, the passenger ship on which Mom and my grandparents returned from Europe in 1933.

A young Jessica wearing her Grandma Vi's national costume of Finland.