Joulu Kotona (Christmas at home): translocal multilingual practices in a Facebook music livestream during COVID-19

Abstract This paper looks at how a Finnish music trio and its audience managed to reconcile locality and globality during a Christmas concert streamed through Facebook Live amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. It does so as this pandemic forced the numerous and hugely popular Christmas concerts in Finland that are usually held in churches and other venues to move online, where musicians were now not just addressing local, Finnish-speaking listeners but a global audience. Specifically, I examine how both the musicians and the audience constructed this Christmas-at-home concert as a distinctly translocal event through adopting various multilingual practices that enabled them to experience local and global senses of identity and community. Using an online ethnographic perspective, which combines discourse-centred online ethnography with analytic autoethnography, I discuss transcripts of the musicians’ spoken discourse, written comments from the audience in Facebook Live’s chat, and excerpts from an interview with one of the musicians to showcase the translocality of digital communication; the translocality of Finnish culture; and the translocality of the Christmas and the Christmas-at-home experience in pandemic times.