41 years of giant, swedish, goat-burning glory

This story, full of burning 40-foot-tall goats, is so awesomely awesome that I need to shout out to Josh Karns for alerting me to it.

So here’s the deal. For 42 years, a bunch of goat-crazed fanatics in the scenic, seaside town of Gavle, Sweden have spent a fair portion of each December building a giant, 40-foot tall goat out of straw. Like, almost 4 tons of straw. (You can watch their efforts in a nifty time-lapse film.) They take great pride in the fact that their Christmas Goat, as they call it, is the largest of its kind in the world. They also take great pains to protect their giant goat from being destroyed, because, for reasons obvious enough to this goat-hater, townspeople have made it their goal, year after year, to destroy the damn thing. In its 41 incarnations, the goat has been destroyed 28 times — 22 of those times by burning, and 6 of them in some other creative way, either by sabotage, fire, or crashing a car into it.

See for yourself, in this compilation of 40 years of Swedish Christmas Goat status reports

1966: unmolested
1967: unmolested
1968: unmolested
1969: burned
1970: burned, then rebuilt
1971: abandoned, then broken
1972: collapsed due to sabotage
1973: unknown
1974: burned
1975: unknown
1976: destroyed in car crash
1977: unknown
1978: broken
1979: burned, rebuilt, then sabotaged and broken
1980: burned
1981: survived
1982: burned
1983: legs broken
1984: burned
1985: burned
1986: burned
1987: burned
1988: survived
1989: burned, rebuilt, burned again
1990: survived
1991: burned, rebuilt
1992: burned, rebuilt, burned again
1993: survived
1994: survived
1995: burned, rebuilt
1996: survived
1997: slightly damaged by fireworks
1998: burned
1999: burned
2000: burned
2001: burned
2002: survived
2003: burned, rebuilt
2004: burned
2005: burned, rebuilt
2006: minor burn to right leg

This year, the straw has been impregnated with a waterproof/snowproorf flame retardant, a webcam has been placed nearby to monitor it, and guards have occasionally been posted overnight to protect it from vandals. There’s even a blog, hopefully the only one if the world, written from the point of view of a giant goat, where other goat-crazed fanatics can delight in the supposed glory of, and send email to <gavlegoat@merjuligavle.se >, a giant inanimate chemical-laden goat.

So here’s hoping some creative pyromaniac gets to the Christmas Goat before too many people are forced to see this thing.