When the Nisse Stirred the Coffee

I will take you on a journey through time. No, not into the future, but back in time. All the way back to my childhood, about 53 years ago. Okay, I can’t be exact, but the experience and retelling keep the memory alive because it was so sweet.

My grandparents had a big farm. My grandfather spent many hours in the barn, and my grandmother took care of the house and the garden. She kept everything sparkling clean, the food was plentiful and well-prepared, and she baked and preserved. In spring, summer, and fall, there was also the garden, with flower beds and a large vegetable garden. It was my grandfather’s task to plant and dig up the potatoes—that’s how the work was divided.

One of my grandmother’s duties was to have breakfast ready every morning at 7. Then, my grandfather and the stable hand would come in to eat. They had already been working since 5 a.m. because my grandfather was always up at 4:30. After working hard in the barn, they were very hungry, so there was a lot of food on the table.

As tradition had it in the week before Christmas, breakfast was a little different—a small Danish Christmas feast every morning. Now, if you’re not Danish, you might not know what a Christmas feast is. It’s a larger spread, with herring, head cheese, warm meatballs, roast pork, sugar-browned potatoes, creamed kale, and many other delicious traditional Danish dishes. Instead of coffee, it was served with Christmas beer, called “hvidtøl” or "Nisseøl", but it wasn’t cold. No, it was heated with some extra sugar and water so it was piping hot.

In the large kitchen, there was an old-fashioned wood-burning stove that could heat the entire house when a lot of food was being cooked. But in the mid-1960s, my grandmother had insisted on an electric stove, especially for easier work in the mornings. So, there was a large stove surface where she could place pots and pans. And, of course, coffee pots, which were metal back then with a cloth filter, not like today’s glass coffee carafes.

As Christmas approached, my grandmother was busy preparing the Christmas cookies, and my mom, sister, and I were dropped off at the farm around 8:30 a.m. to help roll peppernuts, cut gingerbread, and mostly taste all the delicious cookies.

The big old stove was in full use because Christmas cookies simply weren’t baked in the electric oven—no, Christmas baking and later Christmas cooking were always done on the old one. The smell of cookies and beechwood fuel filled the whole house with warmth and activity.

At 9:30, my grandfather and the stable hand came in for a cup of coffee but quickly made themselves scarce again, as my grandmother let them know that they were in the way of the cookie tins and dough taking over the table.

My sister and I ran back and forth to the cellar to fetch empty tins, and gradually we also took full tins back down with strict instructions to be careful on the stairs so the fragile gingerbread wouldn’t break.

At a little past 10, there was a knock on the door. It was the postman, Hauge. He had been on this route for many years and was a good family friend. He brought another round of Christmas cards that friends and family sent each other in the days leading up to Christmas.

“Hauge, you can’t put them on the stove today—it’s fired up!” was my grandmother’s welcome. “You’ll have to leave them on the desk in the living room today.”

Hauge admired the busy hands rolling peppernuts and stacking cookies in tins. “You’re really busy—I’d better head out again.”

“Oh, now come on,” my grandmother insisted. “Why don’t you sit down at the long table—there’s surely room for a cup of coffee and a cookie.”

It seemed like Hauge had been hoping for that. It was quite common for him to have coffee at my grandparents’ house, and on this cold December day, just before Christmas, it was surely nice to leave his bicycle in the cold and come inside to warm up.

Hauge sat on the bench by the window, and my grandmother flew over to the stove and grabbed a coffee pot. I noticed it was empty. She scanned the pots on the stove, then grabbed one with a brownish liquid, likely leftover coffee from her own early morning. She didn’t drink the warm Christmas beer herself—that was for the hard-working men.

Without hesitation, she poured it into the coffee pot and placed it over the fire. Soon, we could hear the pot’s familiar grumble—the sound it made just before it boiled. She grabbed it again and brought it to the table so Hauge could pour himself a cup while she resumed her cookie-making, chatting away. My grandmother could multitask like no one else, especially if it involved getting the latest news from the village—and who knew better than the postman, who visited every single house?

Hauge poured himself a cup of coffee and blew on the steaming surface. He took a careful sip, and a look of surprise crossed his face. Then he made his unforgettable comment, which left a deep impression on me as a small child:

“Listen here, Ingeborg, I think the nisse are at play—my soul, if this isn’t nisseøl!”

We kids believed in nisse, and if you don’t know what nisse are, they’re a kind of elf with red hats that only appear at Christmas time. They can be good or mischievous nisse.

I believed every word Hauge said. Of course, there had been nisse—it was right before Christmas, after all. And yes, they had surely switched the coffee with nisse beer and tricked my grandmother into pouring it in the coffee pot.

So, that’s a completely true Christmas story that I remember with joy and happily retell every year in the days leading up to Christmas.