A Time of Peace, Joy and Loaves

Christmas doesn’t just happen.

Christmas has to be made.

If someone doesn’t string the special ornaments, give the special gifts, sing the special songs, recite the special prayers, Dec. 25 comes and goes as anonymously as a thin man in a gray suit.

Which goes a long way toward explaining what Anders Karlsson is doing, standing in the kitchen of his Berolina Bakery in Glendale turning the contents of a great mixing bowl out onto a big, wooden table while Christmas carols from a radio tinkle in the background.

The glutinous mass, the color of old ivory, smells sweet, raw, yeasty as it parts from the bowl with sticky reluctance and settles itself on the table. It is studded with slivered almonds, rum-soaked raisins, and bits of candied orange, lemon and cherry. There is enough of it to fill a good-sized pothole on the Glendale Freeway.

In about four hours, the mass on the table will become 70 loaves of stollen, a dense, sweet bread that is a German Christmas tradition. But, like Christmas, the stollen won’t just occur.

First, Karlsson must cut the mass into one and two-pound portions. Then, working one portion with each hand, he must knead and form them into balls. Then he must shape them into loaves and with a wooden rod press into each an indentation that, when the loaf is flipped, forms the traditional ridge on top.

After the loaves have been allowed to rise for about half an hour, he must slide them onto the stone racks of the bakery’s deck oven to bake at 400 degrees for 40 minutes (30 for the one-pounders). When they have cooled, he must dip each loaf in melted butter, then roll it in granulated sugar, then powdered sugar. After they are wrapped in cellophane, the loaves of stollen are ready for sale, at $6.95 and $10.95 apiece.

“It’s not complicated,” Karlsson says. “It’s just a lot of manual labor. You have to do everything by hand.”

Stollen has been a specialty of Berolina Bakery since its founding on Ocean View Boulevard 30 years ago by a German immigrant. Berolina is the name of the little bear that is the traditional symbol of Berlin, the original owner’s hometown. Karlsson, a slender, affable man of 32 who’s been working at his craft for 17 years, makes stollen between Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Karlsson, however, isn’t German. He’s from Sweden.

Youna, his energetic, 31-year-old wife and partner, isn’t German, either. She’s from Belgium.

Helping make Christmas for people in polyglot America, however, bakers have to be able to bake in many languages. Including, of course, Swedish. This is also the time of year when Karlsson produces two exquisite holiday breads of his homeland--Lucia buns, which are made with a fragrant saffron dough, and spicy vort bread, made with unfermented beer, ginger, cloves, orange peel and raisins.

After the couple bought Berolina in 1991, they were nearly overwhelmed by what the supercharged American notion of Christmas meant for their little business. Their son Simon had the bad timing to be born two weeks before Christmas the following year and unavoidably spent many of his earliest days in the bakery with his frantically toiling parents.

“Five years ago, it was, like, a disaster,” Youna says. “The first few years were really, really hectic and very stressful. We didn’t have the experience of how to handle the Christmas holidays, because in Sweden it’s not that big, big, big for bakeries.”

This week, with all the Christmas-making coming to a head, Berolina’s owners have help (not that it has kept the two of them from working 12-hour shifts with no days off recently). Eleven employees assist in the mixing, baking, decorating and selling of a boggling array of pastries and authentic European breads, which are Anders Karlsson’s fond specialty.

“Now we have the right people working for us, and we learned with experience,” Youna says.

“We’ve gotten to where we handle it much better than a few years ago. We all know each other pretty well. People who have worked for us, they all come back at the holidays to help us out and it’s always nice. It’s more joyful now.”

Joyful. Of all the things people do to make Christmas, perhaps nothing is more closely associated with the joyfulness of the holiday than baking. Baking is more a part of Christmas than of any other holiday in the Christian book.

No doubt this has something to do with the warmth and aroma that baking radiates through a household--especially welcome in the northern European climes where many of our Christmas traditions likely originated.

Food, of course, figures centrally in most of our holidays--the turkey at Thanksgiving, the eggs at Easter.

But baked things are different from other foods. In baking, vastly different substances come together into something especially coherent, something you can hold in your hand. To bake is to truly change the form of things, to make sundry ingredients become far more sublime in combination than they ever could be in singularity.

Maybe this reflects how we like to think of ourselves during this season--as ingredients in a poetic and transcendent human whole. It’s a vision we savor in part because we know that, unlike a fine baked good, it will decompose into its prosaic components soon enough.