The Story of Saint Lucia

A wonderful new blog, by a Danish student of English, explains how a Catholic martyr is celebrated in Protestant Scandinavia. (Many thanks to Tea at Trianon for enabling me to discover this blog).

...The story goes that her mother was sick, so the young girl travelled with her mother to the grave of holy Agatha to pray, and during her session of prayer, Lucia saw in a vision that she was to become the patron saint of Syracuse. Her mother became instantly well.

Upon her betterment Lucia’s mother made plans to wed Lucia to a Roman man who, to the Christian Lucia, was a heathen. She refused and refused and the Roman man then vengefully accused her of being a Christian to the officials. They gave her the choice of burning an offering  to the Roman Emperor but Lucia said that she had no more to offer, she had offered it all up to God. It was instead decided to make Lucia the offer and burn her alive, but the men come to fetch her from her mother’s home, could not drag her from the doorstep to the pyre, not even when they used oxen. Lucia said to them that the Holy Spirit was protecting her and the Romans arranged for an executioner to come to her instead and she was killed in her mother’s home. She was martyred and later declared a saint by the church, patron saint of Syracuse and helper of the blind as she was also believed to have plucked out her own eyes, so that no man should see their beauty and fall thus in love...

Here is a photograph of Princess Joséphine-Charlotte of Belgium, daughter of King Leopold III and his Swedish-born wife, Queen Astrid, dressed up as St. Lucia.