Tontun Lyhty

The name of this work is in Finnish as some things do not translate well. In dominant English-American culture, Santa's little helpers are know as elves, are generally small, cheerful, beardless and wear green. They are ridiculous. Their Finnish (and probably Swedish etc.) counterparts are known as tonttu (tomte), deriving from the folkore creature that keeps watch on saunas, barns, stables and so on. At least in modern descriptions, they are short, bearded, oldish, wear pointed caps and grey, red, brown and green. Some more, erm, traditional descriptions include grey skin and one, huge eye, but somehow those hardly ever make it to Christmas decorations. The word tonttu is closely relates to tontti, aka plot, and this is also obvious in Swedish (tomte and tomt). This is naturally because tonttu was the warden of the estate.

Anyway, I built this for my LUG Palikkatakomo's Christmas Ornament contest. I won the pro category. This was the third time, in a row, which is pleasant but also a liiittle bit embarrasing (I'm the chairman, again.) This took a little more than a day. The idea was clear: melancholy, a tonttu squatting in front of a campfire, small 1990s 9V battery box in the base, a light with those super cute 9V light bulbs. During the process, the campfire turned into a snowball lantern, but otherwise it remained the same. Most technical prowess was put into the beard (where else?) and some (maybe less successfully) into the connection of the shoulder pad hat. The rest was easy.

Christmas is over, but I didn't want to hide this until the next one, so I'm capping 2024 of 26 builds with it. Happy New Year!

-Eero.