Welcome, Christmas Mystery Cache

Please do not go to the posted coordinates as you will not find the geocache and that would dampen your spirits during this holiday season.

My Norwegian ancestry is celebrated in various ways, perhaps in cooking (not lutefisk!), traditions, or familiar family sayings. So, imagine my surprise when I found that the history behind one of the most popular songs of the Christmas season, "Welcome Christmas," was not known until the mid 1960s, when Theodore Geisel and Albert Hague included a partial translation of it.

The inhabitants of this isolated community, nestled in a deep valley of a tributary of the Tana river, call themselves the Hu. Their language, Huvian, is like no other on Earth. It is certainly unrelated to the Norse languages of the region, and it seems to have developed in extreme isolation. Nevertheless, Christian missionaries somehow located the village and converted its inhabitants long ago. Then war and pestilence came to the rest of the world, and the Hus were mercifully left alone throughout dark ages, the renaissance and much of the modern age -- it wasn't until the late 1800s when the village was rediscovered.

When Norwegian officials found themselves unable to communicate with the Hus, they sent for famed linguist and anthropologist Allistair McGuinn of Scotland. After many years of living with and studying the Hus, McGuinn translated many of their myths, legends and hymns. Yet, after a few years of worldwide curiosity in this inexplicable community, the Hus were soon all but forgotten as the Industrial age forged on.