{"id":94805,"date":"2016-11-25T07:00:01","date_gmt":"2016-11-25T22:00:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/?p=94805"},"modified":"2019-03-13T12:10:52","modified_gmt":"2019-03-13T19:10:52","slug":"20161125-01","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20161125-01\/?p=94805","title":{"rendered":"The G\u00e4vle Goat is now 50 years old"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In 1966, the Swedish town of G&auml;vle started the tradition of erecting a giant goat made of straw for the Christmas holiday season, and it continues to be the leading example of same. This sounds weird out of context, but a Christmas goat made of straw <a HREF=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Yule_Goat\">is a long-standing Swedish tradition<\/a>. <\/p>\n<p>Anyway, the tradition began in 1966, so the goat is now 50 years old. (Note: Not actually the same goat. Because read on.) <\/p>\n<p>As the goat himself <a HREF=\"http:\/\/merjuligavle.blogspot.com\/\">blogged<\/a>, &#8220;<a HREF=\"http:\/\/merjuligavle.blogspot.com\/2016\/11\/torsdag-24-november-im-bock.html\">I&#8217;m bock<\/a>.&#8221;&sup1; The G&auml;vle Goat also <a HREF=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/gavlebocken\">tweets<\/a>, in both Swedish and English, and it has <a HREF=\"https:\/\/www.instagram.com\/gavlebocken\/\">an Instagram account<\/a>. <\/p>\n<p>The G&auml;vle Goat is famous for many things. It&#8217;s an annual tradition. It holds the Guiness world record for <a HREF=\"http:\/\/www.visitgavle.se\/en\/the-gavlegoat-0\">the largest straw goat<\/a>. It has <a HREF=\"http:\/\/www.visitgavle.se\/sv\/gavlebocken\">a round-the-clock webcam<\/a>. And most years, vandals burn it down. (Wikipedia has <a HREF=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/G%C3%A4vle_goat\">a rundown of the goat&#8217;s fate in nearly every year of its existence<\/a>.) <\/p>\n<p><a HREF=\"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20121217-01\/?p=5813\">Previously<\/a>. <\/p>\n<p>&sup1; This is a multilingual pun (my favorite kind). The G&auml;vle Goat goes by the Swedish name <i>G&auml;vlebocken<\/i>. which means, um, &#8220;The G&auml;vle Goat.&#8221; The Swedish word for goat is <i>bock<\/i>. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Welcome to G\u00e4vle. Please don&#8217;t burn down our goat.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[103],"class_list":["post-94805","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-non-computer"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"<p>Welcome to G\u00e4vle. Please don&#8217;t burn down our goat.<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94805","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=94805"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94805\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=94805"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=94805"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=94805"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}