Seven hundred years later the symbol of the City of Helsingborg, the Keep, or Kärnan finally gets the Christmas’ spirit. This is symbolized by a Santa’s hat hanging from the Keep’s tower, 35 m above ground.
Along the pebble path towards Slottshagen, a beautiful park behind the Keep, everyone has always been able to watch the medieval tower, Kärnan, at a distance. Starting the Advent Sunday an enormously big Santa’s hat is seen to cover the top of the ancient building.
”To convince the Department of Building Permits at the municipality of Helsingborg that the project not was a joke took 10 minutes. After several turns back and forth between the County Administrative Board and the Department of Building Permits, the Cultural Department supported the project and helped us to finally get the last permit”, says Daniel Nilsson who is the project leader of the Santa’s hat project.
Getting the building permit was a small effort compared to the rest of the work – the making of the masterpiece.
”To make the hat 160 m textile fabric was needed and an additional 40 m Elaston with absorbent cotton, a budget of 25,000 kronor and 100 man-hours to put the masterpiece together”, says Agneta Lindström, a master tailor at the city theater, who created it.
The last effort was to bring the Santa’s hat to the top of the Keep, which turned out to be a separate project. ”The hat had two parts, the hat itself and the white pompom. The pompom was carried to the top separately. The hat was rolled up to a ’sausage’, was by feet transported along the stairs to the top of Kärnan and then unrolled along the top”, Nilsson explains.
Changing big symbols is also creating big reactions. According to Daniel Nilsson the feedback so far has been only positive.
”We expected both positive and negative feedback. The negative feedback would come from the conservatives of the city, who eventually didn’t want an ancient building like the Keep to change. On the contrary there has been no negative feedback on the initiative at all, only positive”, Lindström says.
