Pip

Not quite, although it is a bit weird. Lucia is HUGE in Sweden, but it's not a 'family' holiday like Christmas or Thanksgiving. A typical Lucia celebration starts the night before for the teenagers, when they have 'Lussevaka', staying up all night waiting in Lucia. The Youth Centers usually have some sort of nice clean drug-free activities, dancing, watching movies or playing innebandy or something like that, and all the cool kids go somewhere else and get drunk. Anyways, from early Lucia morning all the mixed choirs in Sweden earn 70% of their yearly income by going around in hospitals, old people homes, workplaces, shopping malls etc. dressed in the traditional way and singing the traditional songs. In every school and preschool there is a Lucia procession as well. The weeks before, there has usually been elections in the schools for which girl should be this year's Lucia, the girl who leads the procession and wears the candles in her hair. Typically it's some pretty girl with long blond hair who wins... I'm a brunette, so I never even got nominated. In junior high, our class always nominated Kalle, who was the cutest boy in school and had long shiny blond hair, but strangely enough Kalle never won.
Like I said, every mixed choir and then some have their work cut out for them today. If you can carry a tune, you'll more than likely be pressed into a Lucia procession. I can fill out the soprano part (if I get to warm up in an hour or so) passably, so for six years I had to stand on a cold and windy subway station waaaay to early in the morning for several hours - on my own birthday, mind you - singing Sankta Lucia. Fortunately, I'm not in a situation where I must participate in such nonsense at the moment.
The best part, while I still was in school, was that we always got yummy rice porridge, a ginger snap and a clementine for lunch that day.