A Book Lover’s Christmas Tradition: Jolabokaflod
Jolabokaflod: Iceland’s “Christmas Book Flood” Explained
Jolabokaflod (pronounced YO-la-bok-a-flot) is an Icelandic Christmas tradition where families give each other the gift of books on Christmas Eve, then spend the evening reading them together, usually with hot cocoa or chocolate. The name, Jólabókaflóð, means “Yule book flood” or “Christmas book flood,” and it’s one of the coziest holiday traditions a reading family could ask for.
Making Jolabokaflod a part of your annual Christmas merry-making is a simple and peaceful way to savor the season, which is why we love this tradition at Read-Aloud Revival. Keep reading to discover how Jolabokaflod came to be, why Iceland is such a bookish country, and two simple steps for starting this delightful tradition with your own family this Christmas season.
The History of Jolabokaflod: How a WWII Paper Shortage Started a Tradition
In Iceland, this tradition originated during World War II when imports of foreign merchandise were restricted and paper was just about the only thing that wasn’t rationed in Iceland.
Books became a go-to gift. Publishing houses flooded the market with new books during the last few weeks of the year. What’s more, the Christmas season accounts for 40% of all book sales in Iceland. Hence, the whole “book flood” thing!
Every year since 1944, the Icelandic Publishers Association has published the book bulletin (Bókatíðindi), a catalog of the year’s new books. The association then sends every household in Iceland a copy free of charge.
To this day, books remain the most popular Christmas gift. But Iceland’s history of literature (and literacy) far predates WWII.
Why Iceland is One of the Most Bookish Countries in the World
Icelanders have long been a nation of readers (and writers). According to Smithsonian Magazine, for hundreds of years, the long, cold winters brought with them the “night vigil.” During the night vigil, members of the household would spend the evening doing chores in the relative warmth of the home. While they worked, a designated family member read aloud to the rest.
The night vigil was also a time for families to comply with both church and governmental regulations by teaching their children to read and recite stories!
UNESCO named Reykjavik, Iceland’s capital, a City of Literature in 2011 due to both its long history of writing and reading, as well as its continued modern-day literary culture.
The average Icelander reads 2.4 books per month or roughly 28 books per year. And nearly 1 in 3 Icelanders read a book every day. Plus, a third of Icelanders have used library services in the last year.
For contrast, the median American read two books in 2025. According to a YouGov survey, 40% of Americans didn’t read a single book in 2025. Another 40% read less than 10 books. And reading 20 books put you (and me) in the top 10% of all American readers.
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It seems many of us Americans have a thing or two to learn from the Icelanders about making reading a way of life! So how can you adopt the tradition of Jolabokaflod with your own family?
How to Celebrate Jolabokaflod with Your Family
It’s pretty simple: the Christmas book flood is an invitation for us to do less and to connect more with each other through the power of books. Said another way, Jolabokaflod is books, chocolate, and time set aside—that’s it!
Step 1: Pick a Date for Your Jolabokaflod
Just because Icelanders enjoy a flood of books on Christmas Eve doesn’t mean you have to. You likely already have Christmas Eve traditions or, at the least, plenty of people to see and places to be.
Choose a day that works for you and your family. It could be a special Advent surprise. Or maybe you choose New Year’s Eve. How about Boxing Day (December 26) or the Feast of the Epiphany (January 6)?
I like to pick a date in the quiet liminal period between Christmas and New Year’s.
Just look at your calendar and choose your day for Jolabokaflod. Safeguard it. Don’t allow anything else in there. It is set aside for Jolabokaflod.
Actually, a Read-Aloud Revival Premium member, Megan, told us that she doesn’t even do Jolabokaflod on one day at all. She spreads it out over the whole month. Megan puts books underneath the Christmas tree to be looked at over the whole month. And the kids are invited to read under the twinkling lights of the tree. So cozy!
Commit to whatever works for you and your family—a single evening, a whole day, or more of a book stream that comes and goes throughout the Christmas season. That brings us to Step 2.
Step 2: Decide What Your Christmas Book Flood Will Look Like
Remember: books, chocolate, time set aside. Don’t overthink it. Don’t make it complicated.
Used books, library books, and audiobooks certainly count for Jolabokaflod. And, if you’re looking to pick up some new books to gift, be sure to check out our book recommendations for every age and interest.
One Premium member told us that she gets a variety box of hot chocolate mixes, sets up a bunch of candles, and gives each of her kids a used book picked out just for them. Then, she and the kids enjoy the flood of books in the living room. They sit together with their new books and sample all the different hot chocolate flavors.
Of course, if your family isn’t into sweets, you could do the same with pretzels or popcorn or cheese!
And maybe your family has plenty of books already (is there such a thing?), so you make your Jolabokaflod a time to catch up on your TBR (To Be Read list).
Books, treats, time set aside: those are the only three ingredients you need. Just choose the time, and then figure out what you’re going to read and what you’re going to offer as a treat. Do this as a whole family and it will feel like a gift that you are giving each member of your family. It’s a peaceful, guilt-free evening devoted to simple pleasures.
One More Thing: Keep Dinner Simple, Too
While I’ve been known to substitute frozen yogurt for dinner, you probably won’t have a peaceful bookish evening if you eschew dinner for hot chocolate! So to kick things off, I recommend a simple dinner on whatever day you celebrate Jolabokaflod.
So often as the merrymakers in our families, we work ourselves to death making warm and cozy memories for our families, right? It’s really easy to do that in a way where we don’t get to get in on the joy of that tradition ourselves because we’re working so hard to make it cozy for everyone else. Jolabokaflod should be a Christmas tradition that you get to enjoy, too.
My Jolabokaflod begins with ordering pizza and eating it off paper plates! No cooking. No washing dishes. Sandwiches are another good option. Make-ahead soup. Leftovers. Slow cooker. You get the idea.
Let Jolabokaflod be easy so that it’s not just for your kids, but for you too.
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Sarah Mackenzie (00:00):
What if I told you that there is an Icelandic Christmas tradition that means you would get to spend an entire day or an entire evening reading books and sipping hot cocoa, and that's what you're supposed to be doing. Hello everybody. Do I have a treat for you? This is the Read-Aloud Revival, the show that helps you make meaningful and lasting connections with your kids through books. And I'm your host, Sarah Mackenzie. In this episode, we're talking about how to Jolabokaflod, and you do not want to miss this. Heads up, this is not just an audio podcast, it's also a video. So go to readaloudrevival.com/video to subscribe to the channel or watch this episode on YouTube. What is Jolabokaflod and why on earth are we talking about it? Jolabokaflod can be translated as Christmas book flood or Yule book flood. This is an Icelandic tradition where you gift members of your family with new books and then you drink hot chocolate and basically spend the whole of Christmas Eve reading those books.
(01:19):
So basically it's a Christmas evening set aside for reading and chocolate. If I didn't get your attention before, I've got it now. In Iceland, this tradition originated during World War II when foreign merchandise was restricted and paper was just about the only thing that wasn't rationed in Iceland. So basically publishing houses flooded the market with new books during the last few weeks of the year. It was a Yule book flood, a Christmas book flood. According to NPR, even today a book bulletin is actually delivered to every Icelandic home in mid-November listing new titles and books all in preparation for Jolabokaflod because that's when all these books are flooding the market. It's pretty fabulous. While I was preparing for this episode, I also came across some really interesting information. I didn't know this before, but Iceland is a very bookish country. One recent study from 2019 showed that an average Icelander reads 27 books per year, 27 books in a year.
(02:30):
In America, our average is four books per year, and of course that's an average. So we know that means a few people read a lot and most people read nothing at all. 27 books a year plus get this. One in 10 Icelanders go on to publish a book of their own. That's kind of amazing. I mean, of course a bookish tradition like Jolabokaflod would come out of such readerly magic. Oh my goodness. Okay, so let's talk about what you really want to know. How can we adopt the tradition of Jolabokaflod with our own families? Well, I am here for this. I'm here for this conversation. I'm here for Jolabokaflod, and as far as I can tell, keeping Jolabokaflod simple is really the heart of it. It's an invitation for us to do less, to connect more, to connect with each other and connect with books.
(03:25):
So I want to invite you as I'm talking about this, and as you hear some others talk about what Jolabokaflod looks like in their homes, I want to invite you to keep this super simple. Avoid any temptation you might have to complicate it or to make it anything else than the very, very simple invitation of books and chocolate and time set aside. Let me invite you to settle on your Jolabokaflod for this year in two very simple steps. The first step, pick a date. Now, I mentioned in the intro that the Icelandic tradition is to do this on Christmas Eve, and when I first heard about this tradition, I was kind of bummed actually because I thought, ah, we already do things on Christmas Eve, right? We already have our Christmas tree Eve traditions. We're going to church. We're visiting grandparents oftentimes or opening our new pajamas.
(04:15):
We sort of have our own Christmas Eve things. So it's helpful for you to remember that you can do Jolabokaflod, anytime that works for your family. Just pick a different day if Christmas Eve doesn't work for you. You can do it anytime you want. You could do it on New Year's Eve. You could do it on the Feast of Epiphany, which is January 6th. I actually usually pick a date during that week between Christmas and New Year's is such a gloriously quiet week, right? Like the world does not expect anything from you. So I love picking an evening during that week for Jolabokflod, just look at your calendar, choose your day for Jolabokaflod. Safeguard it. Don't let anything else in there. Set it aside for Jolabokaflod. Actually one of our premium members, Megan told us that she doesn't even do Jolabokaflod on one day at all, but more of over the whole month.
(05:10):
Megan puts books underneath the Christmas tree to be looked at over the whole month. It's a feast of Christmas books and the kids are invited to read under the twinkling lights of the tree. I've also heard of people wrapping up their Christmas books, like Christmas picture books so that the kids can unwrap one book all day through Advent to be read aloud. That seems like a lot of work for me. I love this idea. When I see pictures of it, I always think, oh, I love that. I'm also not the kind of person who has the wherewithal to wrap 24 books. It would never happen.
(05:48):
I have, however, heard of a few hacks to make this easier. If you like the idea of having your kids unwrap a book every day all through December, you could use one of those reusable gift bags and just each morning grab a Christmas book, like maybe you keep the Christmas books in your closet or something and you just pick one. You stick it in that gift bag and you bring it down and everybody opens it up in the morning, breakfast and you read it aloud, and then you can just use that reusable gift bag.
(06:13):
This includes no wrapping. This is much more doable, I think. Much more my style. The bottom line here is that you can make Jolabokaflod work for you. Just look at your calendar and pick a date that works for your family and then save that day or that evening, and that's for Jolabokaflod. We don't do a whole day in my house, we just do an evening. It's basically from dinner on. Now, once you've got a date, you should do step two, which is to decide what Jolabokaflod is going to look like for you.
(06:42):
I really, really, really want to reiterate that you want to keep this simple. Don't overthink it, don't over complicate it. The simplicity of Jolabokaflod is part of what makes it work and part of its magic. Jolabokaflod is basically books plus magic and time set aside. Right. It offers us this really lovely simple joy so we don't need to ruin it by making it really complicated, to making it another thing on our to-do list, another thing we have to plan for. Right. We have enough of those things at Christmastime already. So a few RAR premium members recently told me what their Jolabokflod celebrations look like. So listen in and see if any of the ideas they have for celebrating Jolabokaflod resonates with you.
Speaker 2 (07:29):
I set out all the books on our table and on our benches and on our windowsills and everywhere, and I put everything facing out and I put around chocolates and clementines and things like that, and then the kids go around and choose what they want to read. And then everyone curls up and usually has tea or hot chocolate or mulled cider, something cozy and there are always snacks around.
Speaker 3 (07:57):
What we like to do to celebrate is just spend an entire day reading. We just like to have a lot of snacks. We take pressure off of chores and cleaning and doing any kind of work. We had fires in the fireplace. We have lots of snacks like popcorn and charcuterie boards. Sometimes we've bought new books for that day and other times we just read books that we already have in the house.
Sarah Mackenzie (08:27):
Another member told us that she gets Trader Joe's variety pack of hot chocolate, and then she lights a bunch of candles. She buys a used book for each of her kids, like a special book for each of them. And then on this night when she's got the variety hot chocolate pack and the candles, she lays out all the books in the living room and when the kids come out from the hall, there is a flood of books in the living room and they sit together and they read for the evening sampling all the different hot chocolate flavors. The common theme here is that books are read, treats are shared, and there's time set aside. Books, treats, time set aside. Those are the three ingredients you need.
(09:12):
Whether you want those books to be new gifts, or just books you already have on your shelf, or books you got from the used bookstore, or books that people are already reading, it's completely up to you. Whether you want it to be a mug of hot cocoa and a candy cane or something a little more involved, something a little less involved, that's up to you, right? You're just setting the stage. You're setting aside time and then figuring out what you're going to read and what you're going to offer as a treat. Do this as a whole family, and it feels like a gift. It feels like this tradition that you're giving each member of your family, the gift of time set aside for treats and books, guilt-free time to be together. Enjoy some reading time. Keep this really simple because you already have a lot on your to-do list right now, so you don't need to make this another to-do.
(10:02):
You can actually sink into it like a gift. And actually to that end, there's one other piece of advice that I think we might want to consider and that is to simplify dinner on this particular evening, whatever evening you want to do, your Jolabokaflod on. So often as the merrymakers in our families, we work ourselves to death making everything warm and cozy for our families. Right.
(10:29):
It's really easy to do that in a way where we don't get to get in on the merrymaking or the joy of the tradition ourselves because we're working so hard making it cozy for everyone else. Like I'm so busy picking out books and making treats for Jolabokaflod. Maybe I'm wrapping gifts at Christmas and I'm going to go planning when we're going to go drive around to look at Christmas lights, or when we're going to go see that live nativity, or when we're going to go to the Festival of Trees, or go to the Christmas play, or Christmas caroling or whatever it is that you do at Christmastime. But there's so much doing, and we are the principal merrymakers in our homes, and so we're sometimes so wrapped up in that doing that we don't really get to sink into the leisurely joy of the season, and I think we can let Jolabokaflod be a tradition that you get to sink into, right? That you get to take joy in.
(11:21):
At my house, I am going to be ordering pizza on Jolabokaflod night. That is what we do on Jolabokaflod night. Nobody's cooking. We use paper plates. Nobody's got to do dishes. And then I put out a hot chocolate bar where people can make hot chocolate and put different toppings on it. Nothing super fancy, just a few different toppings and books. That is what happens at my house on Jolabokaflod night, and we love it so, so, so much. Remember Jolabokaflod is not just for your kids, it's for your whole family, and that means you as well. That way it's a tradition that the whole family enjoys and loves. Now let's hear from some Read-Aloud Revival kids about books that they've been reading and loving lately.
Noelle (12:09):
Hi, my Name is Noelle. I am four years old and my favorite book is Supercat because my brother wrote it.
Caleb (12:20):
Hi, my name is Caleb. I'm from Pennsylvania and I'm seven years old, and my favorite book is the Who Would Win? series because it's about other animals fighting other animals and facts about them.
Sadie (12:34):
My name is Sadie. I live in Virginia and I'm eight years old. I recommend A Place to Hang the Moon. I like the part where Ms. Muller stands up to Miss Carr.
Speaker 7 (12:47):
My name is...
Lyla (12:49):
Lyla.
Speaker 7 (12:50):
Lyla.
Lyla (12:50):
[inaudible 00:12:52].
Speaker 7 (12:54):
Pennsylvania. And how old are you?
Lyla (12:57):
I'm telling seven years old.
Speaker 7 (13:00):
You're two.
Lyla (13:00):
I'm two.
Speaker 7 (13:03):
And your favorite book is?
Lyla (13:04):
[inaudible 00:13:06].
Speaker 7 (13:07):
Over and Under the Waves. Say bye.
Lyla (13:09):
Bye.
Sara (13:12):
My name is Sara and I'm in Utah and I'm four years old, and my favorite book is Winnie The Pooh because it's just so funny and silly.
Nico (13:31):
Hi, my name is Nico. I live in India, and my favorite book is called The Arc, The Reed, and the Fire Cloud. I like it because it's unforgettable. I read it three years ago and it's still my favorite book.
Karis (13:45):
Hi, my name is Karis. I live in India. My favorite book is called Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. I like it because it talks about the domestic struggles of women, their personalities, and how they overcome challenges, and I also especially like Beth because she loves music just like me.
Elsa Amendrude (14:07):
Hello, my name is Elsa Amendrude and I live in Central Alberta. My favorite book is Warriors by Erin Hunter because I like animals and adventure.
Soren Amendrude (14:15):
Good morning. My name is Soren Amendrude and I'm from Alberta Canada. My favorite book is Chewy Louie because it's so funny by Harry Schneider.
Britta Amendrude (14:26):
Hello, my name is Britta Amendrude and I'm from Central Alberta Canada, and my favorite series is Mandie by Lois Gladys Leppard because I love mysteries.
Danielle (14:38):
Hello, I'm Danielle. I'm 13 years old and I'm from Florida. The book I recommend is Nevermoor: The Trials of Morrigan Crow. This book is about a girl who is destined to die on her 11th birthday, but she is saved by an odd man and brought to the magical world of Nevermoor. Well, she will then go through trials to enter into a magical society. I recommend this book because the characters are really awesome. Bye.
Sarah Mackenzie (15:02):
Thank you, kids. Hey, did you know your kids can leave a message to be aired on a future episode of the podcast? It's true. Just go to readaloudrevival.com/message to leave me a voicemail. We air those in the order they were received. I'll be back in two weeks with another episode, but in the meantime, you know what to do. Go make meaningful and the lasting connections with your kids through Jolabokaflod.
