I’ve referred to “The Danish Year” before on How to Live in Denmark. It’s a series of events that are simply expected to happen every year in Denmark, even if they aren’t formal holidays. In 2025 I’m going to try to do a podcast every month about aspects of the Danish year, and how they fit into the overall context of where Denmark is coming from, and where it’s going.
The nisse is a centuries-old figure of folklore in Denmark, and in December Nisse get a lot of attention – all month, while Julemanden (Santa Claus) only has one big day near the end.
With their very short stature and pointed red hats, nisse are often confused with Christmas elves, although they are not the same.
Elves exist mostly to help Santa in his workshop, but Nisse have busy lives of their own, closely related to an individual household.
They live in the walls of the home and get up to mischief, like hiding things, or turning milk different colors. They expect a bowl of rice pudding on December 24 and will create trouble if they don’t get one.
Annual spendinig on nisse in Denmark
Nisse are a well-loved tradition in Denmark, and since Denmark is a capitalist country and currently a rather wealthy, nisse have become big business in Denmark.
Although Statistics Denmark, the public agency that tracks nearly everything else in Denmark, does not track spending on Nisse-related items every year, I did a little survey on my own at the housewares store where I like to work during the Christmas rush.
Products for the nisse’s own use
We currently carry 455 Nisse-related products. We have soft fabric nisse dolls for cuddling or decorating, ornamental nisse with strings or stockings for hanging on the tree, hand-painted figurine nisse for sitting on the shelf.
We have an entire wall of those polyresin figurines for sale, each with their own name – Asbjørn, Thorkild, Elvin, Liam, Olivia.
Our selection also includes products for your household nisse’s own use. A little door for the Nisse to come out of the wall at night, usually placed down by the floorboards. A nisse doormat.
Wooden shoes for the Nisse to wear – they used to be quite popular in Denmark, not just the Netherlands. In fact, one persistent Danish euphemism for death is at stiller træskoene – “he has parked his wooden shoes.”
Elderly ladies love nisse in Denmark
At our shop we also sell a tiny rocking chair for the nisse, a tiny honey cake for the nisse, and a little sled or a little bucket for them. No modern items, no iPhone or Cybertruck, just old-fashioned equipment like a little tool box. And a tiny bowl of rice pudding.
The nisse-interested Dane – usually families with small children, but sometimes an older lady who lives on her own – sets all these items up in the house.
(The actress Greta Garbo, who was Swedish, reportedly spent her elder, isolated years with an entire Nisse family living underneath her sofa.)
Crawling nisse
For families with children, the Nisse bring gifts during the holiday season. Some families do that every day in December, for others it’s just every Sunday during Advent. We sell a lot of small Advent gifts at the shop as well.
A kravlenisse, or crawling nisse
And some families hang up kravlenisser, crawling nisse, which are little paper or transparent plastic images of nisse that appear to be crawling up the wall or window.
These aren’t as popular as they once were, perhaps because they don’t cost much and nobody can make any money off them.
Nisse friends in the office
Anyway, holiday season has other roles for the Nisse. At the office, adults might be assigned a nisseven, a nisse friend, somebody they exchange secret gifts with.
They might even wear a pointed Nisse hat, which looks a bit like a Santa hat at a Christmas party, as a sign of good humor and lack of pretension about themselves.
This is especially true if the person wearing the hat is the person in charge, like the department head.
Misunderstandings about Nisse hats
These nisse hats can be a point of contention with internationals.
As I write in my book How to Live in Denmark, I had a bad experience when I worked at Carlsberg, the famous Danish beer company, with a group of French colleagues. We were doing video greetings and asked our various divisions to film themselves wearing the red and white nisse hat.
Let’s just say that the stylish French colleagues really, really did not want to wear the hat.
I don’t think my Danish colleagues expected that reaction. Nisse are so much a part of Christmas life in Denmark that they never expected some other group of people wouldn’t be as enthusiastic as they were.
Germany has gnomes, Ireland has leprechauns
Other countries have creatures that are somewhat like Nisse – certainly Norway and Sweden do, Germany has gnomes, Ireland has leprechauns – but nowhere else are they so central to the Christmas tradition.
Nisse are small, cute, and clever, often outwitting the big creatures around them, which is somewhat like the capable little country of Denmark likes to see itself.
