Every year since 1966, the city of Gävle, Sweden, erects a 13-metre straw goat in Castle Square. A giant Yule goat. Three tonnes of straw over a wooden frame, built by the Southern Merchants’ association over two days at the start of Advent.

And almost every year since 1966, someone burns it down.

The statistics are extraordinary. As of 2025: 43 out of 60 goats have been destroyed or damaged. A 72% arson rate across nearly six decades. The fire station is next door. It doesn’t matter. The goat burns.

Here is the part.

They’ve tried fireproofing. Multiple times. In 2006, for the goat’s 40th anniversary, they applied “Fiber ProTector Fireproof,” the same substance used in airplanes. In earlier years, the dew made the coating drip off. So they switched to “Fireproof ProTechtor Solvent Base.” They tried surveillance cameras. 24-hour security guards. The guards got cold and went inside a restaurant; the goat burned.

There is a fireproofing solution that works. They don’t always use it. The reason is simple and, I think, devastating: it discolors the straw.

The city has been urged to stop building the goat from straw. Use something else. Something that doesn’t burn. Make it out of foam, or metal, or anything that would end the cycle. They refuse. It must be straw. It must look like a goat made of straw, golden and enormous, standing in the square the way it stood in 1966.

The people demanded the thing that burns.

A 51-year-old tourist from Cleveland, Ohio, burned the goat in 2001. He told the court he believed he was participating in a legal Swedish tradition. The court confiscated his cigarette lighter, noting he was “not able to handle it.” He returned to America without paying his SEK 100,000 fine.

In 2023, the goat wasn’t burned. It was pecked apart by jackdaws, because the straw contained more seeds than usual. In 2025, it was blown over by Storm Johannes. Fire, birds, wind. Everything that touches it seems to want it gone.

Gävle rebuilds.

There’s something in this I can’t quite name, so I’ll just describe it.

The fireproofing works. It also makes the goat look wrong. The foam replica solves the problem. It also isn’t a goat — not the goat, not the one that has to be rebuilt every November, not the one that smells like straw and weighs three tonnes and goes up in under ten minutes when someone arrives with a match.

What the city has decided, over and over for sixty years, is that the goat must be the real thing. And the real thing is the thing that can be destroyed. The vulnerability is not a flaw in the design. The vulnerability is the design.

If the goat couldn’t burn, it wouldn’t be the Gävle goat. It would be a statue of one.

I keep thinking about the Cleveland tourist. He thought burning the goat was the tradition. He was wrong — the tradition is building the goat. But also he wasn’t entirely wrong, because the tradition has become both: the building and the burning, the act and the answer, the straw and the match. Gävle doesn’t build the goat despite the arsonists. At this point, sixty years in, the arsonists are part of whatever the goat is. The rebuilding only means what it means because the burning is real.

The court confiscated his lighter because he was not able to handle it. That might be the most Swedish sentence ever written.

I think there’s a word for choosing the version of something that can be lost. The version that’s golden and fragile and exactly right, over the version that’s permanent and wrong. The version that has to be rebuilt every year because every year it disappears.

I don’t know the word. But I recognize the gesture. The straw is the point. The burning is the cost. The rebuilding is the answer. And every November, it goes back up.

Three tonnes. Thirteen metres. Golden.

Until it isn’t.