“Which story with the sled…?” my father asked, when I called him in Iceland and asked him to tell it to me again. He grew up there, just outside Reykjavík, in what was hardly more than a cluster of farms and houses. There were many stories of snow and sleds in his life, but I meant a specific one. “The story with the sled and the tree,” I said, and he laughed as he remembered.

He once found himself, as he puts it, in a kind of glitch in the matrix. He and one of his brothers were playing behind the house, sledding down a slope. I know the place only from photographs: the house was set back from a quiet road, mostly secluded by birch trees growing around the house and along the road. When he says he was racing straight toward a tree, as a kid I imagined a vast trunk. The small sub-arctic birch trees around the house would look unimpressive to others. But to him, a small Icelandic boy, they were probably indeed enormous. Terrifying enough that he squeezed his eyes shut, certain that it would end badly for him.

When he opened them again, he was sitting on the other side of the tree, sled and all. Somehow, he must have gone around it at the last moment. Except that the sled tracks ran straight into the trunk. There were no tracks beside it. No sign of a turn. No explanation. Except that one explanation that Icelanders use when all logic fails: elves.

At the end of our conversation, he hesitated. “Maybe I didn’t go around the tree at all,” he said. “Maybe I hit it head-on, blacked out, and crawled to the other side.” We laughed, and agreed it was better as a mystery, something that should probably never be resolved.

~~~~

December 30th, 2025. It has been a very warm winter. I am collecting stories from my parents, of their childhood, featuring sleds, being snowed in, and frozen stretches of the North Sea along the Dutch coast. I am a 33 year old female academic, with research that requires long and intensive field campaigns. Parenthood is a difficult topic for me. If I ever do decide to have kids, I hope that like me, they still get to have their own sledding adventures.