Norway

The shape of the season

A Norwegian Christmas, jul, is a long, cozy, food-heavy affair that officially runs from Christmas Eve through the thirteenth day, but in practice spreads across all of December. The pre-season is dominated by the julebord, the "Christmas table": work and social Christmas dinners that fill calendars from late November onward. Then comes lille julaften (Little Christmas Eve, December 23), the day for cleaning the house, decorating the tree, and making the rice porridge. December 24, julaften, is the main event, with dinner, the tree, and gifts in the evening, and the days after are for visiting, eating leftovers, and resting deep into the holiday.

A few of Norway's customs are genuinely its own, and the strangest of them involves brooms.

Hiding the brooms

On Christmas Eve, in a custom that survives more as charming folklore than belief, Norwegian households hide their brooms. The old idea was that Christmas Eve was a night when witches and evil spirits were abroad, and they'd steal any broom left out to ride through the sky. So you tucked the brooms away, in closets or under beds, to deny them a ride. Some families still do it with a wink, and in rural areas men have been known to fire a shotgun into the air to scare off the witches. It's a wonderful reminder of how close the old pre-Christian midwinter, with all its spirits, still sits beneath the modern holiday.

Seven kinds of cookies

Norwegian Christmas baking is governed, by tradition, by a number: syv slag, or seven sorts. A proper host bakes seven different types of Christmas cookies and pastries before the holiday, and being able to offer all seven to guests is a quiet point of pride. The classic lineup draws from pepperkaker (gingerbread), krumkake (thin cones pressed on a special iron), sandkaker (almond shortbread pressed into fluted tins), goro (a patterned cardamom wafer), berlinerkranser (wreath-shaped egg-yolk cookies), fattigmann ("poor man's" fried dough), and sirupssnipper (diamond-shaped syrup cookies). Few people bake all seven anymore, but the standard endures as the thing to aim for.

The julenisse and the porridge

The keeper of a Norwegian farm at Christmas is the fjøsnisse or julenisse, a small, bearded gnome who lives in the barn and watches over the animals and the household. He's helpful if respected and a prankster if neglected, and the way you keep him happy is simple: on Christmas Eve you leave him a bowl of rømmegrøt, warm sour-cream porridge, ideally with a generous pat of butter. Skip it, and the legend says your animals will fall ill or your milk will sour. Over the twentieth century this barn gnome merged with the gift-giving Santa figure, so today Julenissen both guards the farm and brings the presents.

That porridge has a second job. The Christmas Eve rice porridge (risengrynsgrøt) is served with a single blanched almond hidden inside; whoever finds it in their bowl wins a prize, traditionally a marzipan pig.

At the table

What's on the Christmas Eve plate depends on where in Norway you are, and Norwegians hold their regional dish with real loyalty:

• Ribbe: roast pork belly with crackling, the dominant choice in eastern Norway and around Oslo.
• Pinnekjøtt: salted, dried (sometimes smoked) lamb or mutton ribs, soaked and then steamed over birch sticks (pinner) laid in the pot, the western and coastal favorite. The name literally means "stick meat."
• Lutefisk: dried cod reconstituted in a lye solution to a translucent, gelatinous texture, served by the brave and the devoted.

Alongside come boiled potatoes, surkål (sweet-and-sour cabbage), sausages, and lingonberry. To drink: gløgg, the Nordic mulled wine, and juleøl, the stronger seasonal Christmas beer. After dinner, the family joins hands and walks around the tree singing carols before the gifts are opened.

Inside the home

Norwegian trees lean handmade and heartfelt. The signature ornament is the julehjerte, a heart woven from two colors of glossy paper into a little basket you can fill with candy or nuts. Children make them by the dozen, and they hang all over the tree. Straw stars and goats, small Norwegian flags strung as garland, and white lights complete the look; the tree itself goes up late, often only on December 23, and never weeks in advance.

Outdoors, many families hang a julenek, a sheaf of wheat or oats, on a pole or by the door, so that the birds have their own Christmas feast. It's a small act of seasonal generosity that's been kept for generations.

If you wanted to borrow this tradition

The most joyful import is syv slag: pick a number of cookie types and make the variety itself the tradition. It turns Christmas baking into a satisfying, finite project rather than an open-ended chore, and a plate offering seven different homemade cookies genuinely impresses.

The paper heart baskets (julehjerter) are an easy, beautiful kids' craft that produces both decorations and little gift-holders. And the julenek, a sheaf of grain hung out for the birds, is a lovely, low-effort way to fold a bit of generosity into the season. The broom-hiding is mostly a story now, but it's a great one to tell children, and a reminder that midwinter has always had a spooky edge under the candlelight.

Did you know

• The giant Christmas tree that lights up Trafalgar Square in London every year is a gift from the city of Oslo, sent annually since 1947 as thanks for British support during the Second World War.
• Pinnekjøtt's name, "stick meat," comes from the birch sticks the lamb ribs are steamed over, which keep the meat off the bottom of the pot and lend a faint woody flavor.
• Norwegians say the household nisse predates Christianity in the country; the custom of leaving him porridge is one of the oldest surviving midwinter rituals in Scandinavia.