Juletradisjoner og nisser — Christmas with porridge, goats, and little red caps
Norwegian Christmas as folklore — the julenisse who became Santa Claus, the porridge offerings, the julebukk goats, the Åsgårdsreien Wild Hunt riding through the sky between Christmas and Epiphany. A Lutheran Christmas with pre-Christian bones underneath.
The word came before the church did. Jul was the midwinter feast of pre-Christian Scandinavia — weeks of slaughter, brewing, and eating at the darkest turn of the year — and when Christianity arrived it did not replace the feast so much as move in with it. A thousand years of Lutheran Christmases later, the old bones are still visible everywhere in a Norwegian December, if you know what you’re looking at.
Start with the darkness itself. The nights between Christmas and Epiphany were the most dangerous of the Norwegian year — romjula, the days between, when the boundary thinned. That is when Åsgårdsreien, the Wild Hunt, rides: a storm-host of the dead sweeping over the valleys on the winter wind, taking the careless with it. Farms brewed their Christmas beer and then marked the barrels with a cross; steel went over the stable door; work stopped. You did not stay out late in romjula, and the reason given was not the weather.
The food had passengers too. The Christmas Eve porridge — rice, cream, a lump of butter melting on top — is set out for the family, and one bowl goes to the barn, for the nisse. Skip it, or skimp on the butter, and the farm spirit who kept the animals all year begins to un-keep them. The bowl on the barn floor is an offering in the oldest sense of the word, still being made, now mostly with a smile, on the twenty-fourth of December.
Then there is the goat. The julebukk — the Yule goat — is one of the strangest survivors in Scandinavian Christmas: a figure with pre-Christian horns, possibly the echo of the goats that drew Thor’s chariot, that spent centuries as midwinter’s resident monster. Young people went julebukking between Christmas and New Year — masked, sheepskinned, sometimes carrying a carved goat’s head on a pole — going farm to farm, performing, demanding drink and Christmas food, frightening the children on purpose. The custom survives in pockets of Norway and among Norwegian-Americans in the Midwest to this day, softened into costumed children singing for treats: trick-or-treating’s northern cousin, attached to Christmas instead of Halloween. The straw goat on a modern Norwegian Christmas tree is the same animal, miniaturized and declawed.
And finally the little man in the red cap. The julenisse who arrives in person on Christmas Eve — knocking on the door, sack over the shoulder, asking Er det noen snille barn her? (are there any good children here?) — is the farm nisse promoted into a gift-bringer, wearing the feast-day of Saint Nicholas, whose name he had carried all along. Through the nineteenth century’s Christmas cards the sharp-tempered barn spirit merged with the international Santa Claus, and the merger ran both directions: the American Santa got some of the nisse’s domesticity, and the nisse got Santa’s job. In a Norwegian home the presents still come from him — hand-delivered, by a relative in a red cap the children pretend not to recognize, while a bowl of porridge waits somewhere for a smaller, older version of the same creature.
A Norwegian Christmas, seen from underneath, is a truce: the church’s feast on top, and beneath it the porridge offering, the masked goat, the marked barrels, and the host riding the wind between the farms — the old midwinter, still being paid its dues.