I wrote this in May of 2022, but never posted it. So here I am, sharing it as I wrote it 18 months ago.
In the last year I’ve visited Norway a few times (a plus of living in Denmark for a period), and for essentially the first time as an adult and without my family there. Once I visited family (who I’d never met before), once I visited family friends (who I know very well), and once I spent a week making cheese in a town I’d never heard of until a few weeks before. I feel like I visit Norway with two identities—my family is Norwegian (my dad and his siblings were born there and immigrated to the US in the 70s) so I’m familiar with a lot of household happenings. I know how to use an ostehøvel and how to fold my dyne. But I’m thoroughly American; I was born and raised here, I don’t speak Norwegian, all my ‘Norwegian culture’ is inculcated exclusively by my family. Which has led to an interesting personal project of deciphering what is unique to my family and what is broadly more ‘Norwegian’—black coffee? strawberry jam? stoned wheat thins? I’m still in the process of figuring it out.
This double-faceted identity I feel provides really good fodder for many of my thought tangents. What is culture really? How is it transmitted? Can you continue it without a community? It also provides a really interesting point of comparison—how is my Norwegian culture different from Norway’s Norwegian culture? What my family does is almost stuck in the past, in the 60s or 70s, and it’s fascinating to see how the country has changed since then.
I was in Norway over Christmas and Easter, two really big holidays for what is a self-avowedly secular country. But time off from work and tradition are also huge in Norway, so it does make some sense that these holidays are widely celebrated, and over both holidays there are traditions that the whole country partakes in. And I mean the whole country. On Christmas Day you watch Tre Nøtter til Askepott (Three Wishes for Cinderella), which is a Czech film from the 70s that’s been dubbed in Norwegian; the government even paid for the film to be updated so people could continue watching it 50 years after its filming (they made a new, fully Norwegian version this year, but my guess is that people will continue watching the old one on Christmas Day). I watched it at my friend’s house, and she showed me how everyone on her social media was also posting about watching it. It’s what you do (though you also have to either fall asleep or do something else during it—god forbid you actively watch the whole thing). It’s a bit silly and a bit inane, but it made me laugh and watching it was very hygge.
During Easter Week (because you get the whole week off, obviously) is the time for Påskekrim (Easter Crime). New Nordic Noir books are released around this time, there are book festivals, and Norwegian national television airs murder mystery shows under the heading “Påskekrim.” When I was with my great aunt right before Easter we watched Shetland and Manhunt, both British crime shows that were fully subtitled in Norwegian and aired on national television. I love murder mystery/crime books and shows, so I really dig this tradition. But, and maybe this is the American in me, the idea of a tradition that almost literally the entire country partakes in blows my mind.
Curious about these two traditions, I asked both my dad and my grandmother if they knew about or remembered either of them—they had not. Which piqued my curiosity even more, because if everyone in Norway claims them as tradition, they’re pretty new traditions! And Norway is a small country, but they seem to have spread across most of the country pretty rapidly. I did some digging on the ‘official’ histories of these traditions to try to match up timelines.
It seems that Påskekrim has its origins in the 1920s, when a well-placed advertisement in a national newspaper caused people to mistake the title of a crime novel with an actual Train being Plundered at Night. Crime novels especially rose in popularity because they were small and soft cover, perfect for taking to cabins during the holiday (everyone in Norway goes to a cabin during Easter holiday). And no doubt advertising played a huge part in the formation of the tradition. But I was unable to find dates beyond the standard “it started with this one book in 1923”—every source had the same storyline and not much more information. I’m not entirely satisfied though, because my grandma was born in the 40s and lived in many places in Norway during the four decades before she moved here and said that Påskekrim wasn’t a huge deal when she lived there. It seems like it’s become a lot bigger in the last 40 years, and I want to know how and why.
I found marginally more information about Tre Nøtter til Askepott. Many people on this Reddit thread said they’ve been watching it on Christmas for as long as they can remember (which isn’t actually all that helpful), but one person mentioned that they’ve watched it every year since the 80s. It seems like a lot of millennials don’t remember Christmas without it, but I couldn’t find much info from older people about how long they remember it being an integral part of Jule. And again, since neither my grandma nor my dad remembers this tradition, I really wonder when it became a thing. The 80s seems about right, right after my family left, but if so there are certainly people alive that remember Christmases without Askepott.
These two traditions stood out to me because everyone I met claimed they’d been going on forever, but my family neither participated in them nor had any knowledge of them. This then brought up bigger questions about what are traditions, how do traditions become traditions, how long does something have to be done before it’s considered a tradition, and who gets to decide that something is a tradition.
Mouth Potato 