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ᛃ · Norse Calendar

Norwegian Christmas Traditions: Porridge for the Nisse, Seven Cookies and Bells at Five

November 9, 2026·13 min read

Written by Sonya · Halden, Norway

At five o'clock on Christmas Eve, church bells ring Christmas in across Norway. Here's how a Norwegian Christmas actually goes — and which customs are really old.

At five o'clock on the afternoon of December 24, church bells start ringing all over Norway. They ring Christmas in, ringer julen inn, and for most of us that sound is when it really begins. Not on the 25th. In Norway the big night is Christmas Eve, julaften: the dinner, the presents and the walk around the tree all happen on the 24th.

Some of what we do is genuinely old, some came from Germany or Sweden in the 1800s, and a couple of things Americans read about online are more legend than living habit. Here's how a Norwegian Christmas actually goes, and where each custom comes from.

Short answer: The core Norwegian Christmas traditions are dinner on Christmas Eve (pork ribs, lamb ribs or lutefisk, depending on the region), rice porridge with a hidden almond, a bowl of porridge for the barn nisse, seven kinds of home-baked cookies, Christmas beer, and a sheaf of grain for the birds. The beer and the feast have pre-Christian roots. The tree, the presents and Santa as we know him became common in the 1800s.

Why everything happens on Christmas Eve

The 5 p.m. bells have a practical history. December 24 used to be a working day of scrubbing and decorating, and at five, work stopped and the bells announced that Christmas had begun (Store norske leksikon, "julaften"). Today most families do the cleaning on lille julaften, "little Christmas Eve", the 23rd. That's also when many of us put up the tree and watch Kvelden før kvelden ("The Night Before the Night"), usually one of the most-watched TV programs of the year (SNL, "lille julaften").

Christmas Eve has its own TV ritual, and it's an odd one. Every year NRK, the national broadcaster, shows Tre nøtter til Askepott (Three Wishes for Cinderella), a 1973 Czechoslovak–East German fairy-tale film in which one Norwegian actor, Knut Risan, dubs every single voice over the original soundtrack. It became a fixture of the 24th in the 1990s, and in 2021 about 932,000 Norwegians watched it (SNL, "Tre nøtter til Askepott").

After dinner, families walk around the tree singing carols before the presents come out. The tree is a newcomer, by the way: it only became normal in ordinary Norwegian homes in the 1870s and 1880s (SNL, "juletre").

A bowl of porridge for the nisse

On Christmas Eve, a lot of Norwegians carry a bowl of rice porridge out to the barn, or the porch if there's no barn, with a pat of butter melting in the middle. It's for the nisse.

The nisse wasn't Santa to begin with. In folk belief he was a small, very strong old man in gray with a red cap and a beard who lived in the barn and helped with the farm work, but could hurt people and animals if he was treated badly. Porridge with a "butter eye" (smørøye) on Christmas Eve kept him on your side for the year ahead. Folklorists see him as a descendant of the gardvord, the guardian spirit of the farm, probably rooted in pre-Christian reverence for the man who first cleared the land, often buried in a mound on the farm and given food and ale at the great feasts, above all at Yule (SNL, "nisse").

The name is younger than the idea. Nisse is a pet form of Nils, the Nordic version of Nicholas, and it reached Norway from Denmark (SNL). So the barn nisse and julenissen, the Christmas gift-bringer, only shared a name at first. Julenissen goes back to Saint Nicholas, by way of Dutch Sinterklaas and the American Santa Claus, and arrived in the Nordic countries in the late 1800s. Norwegians never drew a sharp line between the two, and in our folklore julenissen has become a kind of head nisse with smaller barn nisser helping him (SNL, "julenissen").

Two details we love. The first Norwegian Christmas card with a nisse was drawn by Wilhelm Larsen in 1883: a little gray man throwing snowballs at a fence, where they spell out Glædelig Jul. And during the German occupation, the red nisse cap became a quiet protest symbol, and it was banned on February 26, 1942 (SNL).

One thing the nisse is not: Odin in disguise. He descends from farm spirits, not from the Allfather, and the Odin–Santa theory is a separate story we take apart in Viking Santa? Our Tomte gnome ornament is the same little fellow under his Swedish name.

The almond in the porridge

The porridge is risgrøt, rice cooked slowly in milk and topped with sugar, cinnamon and butter, traditionally eaten between breakfast and dinner on Christmas Eve (Visit Norway). One almond is hidden in the pot, and whoever finds it wins a marzipan pig. That custom is old and still going strong (SNL, "julaften").

Rice came late, too. Before it was imported in the 1700s, Christmas milk porridge was made with barley. Leftover porridge folded into whipped cream becomes riskrem, the classic Christmas dessert with red berry sauce (SNL, "norsk julemat").

Ribbe, pinnekjøtt or lutefisk: Norwegian Christmas food

Ask Norwegians what they eat on Christmas Eve and you'll learn where their family comes from. Most households serve one main dish (Visit Norway), and the country splits into two camps.

Ribbe is the rib section of the pig, roasted until the rind puffs up into crackling and served with sauerkraut, pork sausages and meatcakes, and potatoes. Its heartland is the grain-growing east and Trøndelag (SNL, "svineribbe"). Pinnekjøtt, "stick meat", is salted, dried and sometimes smoked lamb ribs, soaked and then steamed over a rack of birch sticks, with mashed rutabaga on the side (SNL, "pinnekjøtt"). In western Norway 70 to 80 percent eat pinnekjøtt on Christmas Eve; in the east it's the other way around. Nationally, SNL puts ribbe at about half of households and pinnekjøtt at about 40 percent and rising (SNL, "norsk julemat"). Visit Norway already calls pinnekjøtt number one.

The twist is that ribbe, which so many of us think of as timeless, is the youngest of the three. Cooked the way we do it now, with several pots going at once, it needed a cast-iron stove, and most people didn't have one until the early 1900s (SNL, "svineribbe"). Pinnekjøtt is documented from the 1700s and is probably much older.

Then there's lutefisk, dried cod soaked in lye until it turns soft and jelly-like. It's documented in Norway back to the 1500s and eaten all over the country (SNL, "lutefisk"). Fish on Christmas Eve is a leftover from Catholic times: before the Reformation in 1536, the weeks from December 1 until Christmas morning were a fast, and meat wasn't allowed until Christmas Day. Many families still eat lutefisk, cod or halibut on the 24th. None of this is Viking food, by the way. For what people actually ate a thousand years ago, see What Did Vikings Actually Eat?

Christmas beer, required by law

With all this, Norwegians drink juleøl, dark and strong Christmas beer, often alongside a glass of aquavit (Visit Norway). Of everything on the table, the beer has the best claim to pagan roots. In Haraldskvæði, a skaldic poem from around 900, the king will "drink Yule" out at sea, and "drinking Yule" meant celebrating it (SNL, "jul").

When Norway turned Christian, the church kept the ale and changed the toast. The Gulating Law of western Norway says, in our translation of the modern Norwegian version: "Yet another ale-brewing we have promised to make, farmer and housewife an equal share each, and to bless it on the holy night to Christ and holy Mary, in thanks for a good year and peace." Skipping it meant a fine of three marks to the bishop. A farmer who went three winters without brewing and wouldn't pay lost his farm, half to the king and half to the bishop, and if he refused to confess and do penance, he had to leave the country (Norgeshistorie.no, University of Oslo).

Same ale, same wish for a good year and peace, new name on the cup. The older Yule feast, and King Hákon's move of it to Christmas, are in our guide on how to celebrate Yule.

Seven kinds of cookies

A proper Norwegian Christmas has syv slag, seven kinds of home-baked cookies, and no two families agree on which seven. A survey cited by SNL found the ones most people name: smultringer (cardamom doughnut rings), fattigmann (fried diamond-shaped knots, "poor man's cookies", despite all the eggs and cream), sandkaker (thin almond butter cookies pressed into little tins), sirupssnipper (thin spiced diamonds with half an almond on top), berlinerkranser (butter wreaths with pearl sugar), goro (thin patterned rectangles) and krumkaker (crisp wafers rolled into cones) (SNL, "julekaker"; SNL, "fattigmann"; SNL, "pepperkaker"; NRK Mat, "Sandkaker").

A rustic wooden table with plates of Norwegian Christmas cookies by candlelight: rolled wafer cones, sugared wreaths, fried rings, powdered pastries and heart-shaped gingerbread

The old rule of thumb was to balance three methods: cookies baked in patterned irons, cookies fried in lard, and cookies baked in the oven. The iron cookies are the oldest. The first cookie irons came to Norway from Holland in the 1600s, while the oven cookies multiplied once the cast-iron stove spread in the 1800s (SNL, "julekaker"). Why seven? SNL points to the number's sacred place in the Bible; Visit Norway says it was simply lucky. Either way, goro alone can eat an evening: one 1850s account from a vicarage in Lom says the old iron made a single cookie at a time, so a batch took all night (SNL, "goro").

Julenek: a sheaf of grain for the birds

In December you'll see bundles of oats or barley hung high on poles or in trees outside Norwegian homes. That's the julenek, the Christmas sheaf, put out so the birds get a feast too. Unlike most old farm customs, it never died out, and it's as common in towns as in the countryside (SNL, "julenek").

A sheaf of golden oats tied to a wooden pole in a snowy farmyard, with sparrows and a bullfinch feeding on the grain

Its history is a lesson in being careful with "ancient". The first written description is in Erik Pontoppidan's natural history of Norway from 1753, although the custom is older. Priests in the 1700s condemned it as heathen, which is partly why earlier scholars decided it must be an offering to Odin. SNL is blunt that there's no direct evidence for that. Other explanations range from protection against evil to bribing the birds to spare next year's crop, or simply making sure every creature on the farm got a little extra at Christmas (SNL).

The sheaf was also a forecast. Sparrows, bullfinches and great tits eating eagerly meant a good harvest. A magpie arriving first was bad news, so some people chased magpies off before they could land (SNL).

Hiding the brooms on Christmas Eve

This is the one Americans ask about most: Norwegians supposedly hide their brooms on Christmas Eve so witches can't steal them. Bring it up in Norway, though, and you'll meet plenty of people who have never heard of it. Is it made up?

Not entirely. In old folk belief, Christmas night was one of the most dangerous nights of the year. The oskoreia, a roaring host of restless dead, rode through the sky, and households protected themselves with tar crosses over the doors and steel tools above the stalls (SNL, "julenatt"; SNL, "åsgårdsrei"). Witches, trollkjerringer, were out as well, riding brooms and dung shovels. One farm precaution described by forskning.no runs the opposite way from the popular version: you set the broom and shovel outside the barn door so the witches would take those and leave the animals alone (forskning.no, "Den farlige julenatta").

The belief had a grim real-world side. In January 1663, at a witch trial in Vardø in the far north, a woman testified that witches had flown on brooms to a great gathering on the Dovre mountains on Christmas Eve 1661. The court took her at her word, and she and the woman she accused were burned that March (Rune Blix Hagen, UiT The Arctic University of Norway). So the Christmas witch on her broom belongs to the folklore of the 1600s onward. It isn't Viking, and "hide every broom" is mostly how the story is told abroad today.

Lucia, julebord and julebukk

On December 13, children in white gowns walk in candlelit Lucia processions, and there are lussekatter buns to bake or eat. The custom reached Norway from Sweden in the 1950s, but underneath it lies something older and darker: lussinatt, when the spirit Lussi and other evil powers were abroad and the dangerous Christmas season began (SNL, "luciadagen").

Julebord, "Christmas table", is what we call the office or club Christmas party, a buffet with plenty of pork and plenty to drink. That meaning took hold in the 20th century. The older julebord was the family table on Christmas Eve, left laid all night so the family's dead could come home and help themselves (SNL, "julebord").

Between Christmas and New Year, children in nisse caps still go julebukk, door to door singing for treats (SNL, "julebukk"). They are the tame descendants of a much rowdier masked custom covered in The Yule Goat (Julebukk). Iceland's stranger visitors are in The Yule Lads.

Old, Catholic or 1800s? A quick sorting

Tradition Oldest solid evidence What it is
Christmas beer Skaldic poem c. 900; Gulating Law Pagan Yule custom, Christianized
Porridge for the nisse Nisse beliefs recorded by priests from the 1500s Folk belief, likely pre-Christian roots
Lutefisk, fish on the 24th 1500s; Catholic Advent fast Medieval Catholic
Julenek Written 1753, older in practice Folk custom; the Odin link is unproven
Witches and brooms 1660s witch-trial records Early modern folklore
Christmas tree Oslo 1820s, common by the 1880s Import from Germany
Julenissen bringing gifts Late 1800s Saint Nicholas via Santa, merged with the nisse
Lucia procession Norway in the 1950s Swedish import
Ribbe for Christmas dinner Early 1900s Modern, needs a stove

For a bit of this at your own table, our Christmas & Yule collection has pieces designed around these traditions, like the Yule Goat sweatshirt and a wooden Yggdrasil ornament, whose meaning we explain in Norse Yule Ornaments. Stuck on a gift? Try the Yule gift finder. Shipping is free on every US order, and free worldwide on orders over 100 USD.

God jul.

FAQ

What is the most popular Christmas dinner in Norway?

It's close. Ribbe (roast pork rib) has long led nationally, at about half of households on Christmas Eve. Pinnekjøtt (dried lamb ribs) is around 40 percent, rising, and rules in western Norway. Lutefisk and cod are the fish options.

Do Norwegians celebrate Christmas on the 24th or the 25th?

The 24th. Church bells ring Christmas in at 5 p.m. on Christmas Eve, and dinner and presents follow that evening. December 25 and 26 are public holidays too, but quieter.

Why do Norwegians leave porridge out on Christmas Eve?

For the nisse, the little farm spirit of Norwegian folklore. A bowl of rice porridge with butter kept him happy, so he would help on the farm instead of making trouble. Many families still put a bowl out.

Do Norwegians really hide their brooms on Christmas Eve?

Not in the way the internet describes. The idea comes from old beliefs that witches rode brooms on Christmas night, and some older accounts describe setting brooms outside the barn door rather than hiding them. It's folklore from the 1600s onward, not a Viking custom.

What are the seven kinds of Norwegian Christmas cookies?

There's no fixed list. The ones most often named are smultringer, fattigmann, sandkaker, sirupssnipper (or gingerbread), berlinerkranser, goro and krumkaker.

Is there a Norwegian yule log tradition?

Not as a well-known custom today. In the sources we checked, what stands out in Norway is candlelight: a candle on the Christmas table was meant to burn all night, both for warmth and to keep evil away.

Sources (all opened and checked 9 Nov 2026)