The nisse is a centuries-old figure in Danish folklore, and every December these tiny, mischievous spirits take center stage. While Santa Claus makes one big appearance late in the month, the nisse are active the whole season long.

With their short stature and bright red hats, nisse are often mistaken for Santa's elves, but they live very different lives. Rather than helping in a workshop, nisse belong to individual households. They slip in and out of the walls at night, hide everyday objects, turn milk strange colors, and generally make harmless trouble. On December 24 they expect a bowl of rice pudding, and if they don't get it, they're known to act out.

In modern Denmark, nisse aren't just folklore—they're also big business. At the housewares shop where I work during the Christmas rush, we stock more than 450 nisse-related products. There are soft dolls, tree ornaments, and hand-painted figurines with names like Asbjørn, Thorkild, Elvin, Liam, and Olivia.

And then there are the accessories: tiny doors for the nisse to "enter" the home, miniature doormats, wooden shoes, rocking chairs, honey cakes, buckets, sleds, toolboxes, and of course the classic bowl of rice pudding. Many families—especially those with small children, and a surprising number of older women living alone—create small nisse worlds inside their homes.

Some families also hang kravlenisser, the little paper nisse that "crawl" up walls and windows. They're not as popular as they once were, mostly because they're inexpensive and don't fuel the booming nisse economy.

Nisse season extends into the workplace, too. Danes might be assigned a nisseven, or "nisse friend," for secret gift-giving at the office. And at holiday parties, even managers may don the pointed red nisse hat—a cheerful symbol of community and self-irony that sometimes surprises international colleagues.

From home traditions to office fun, the nisse remain an essential part of Christmas in Denmark: tiny spirits with big personalities, and an even bigger cultural footprint.

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November always seems like the rainiest of Danish months, but it isn't, actually. October is. But November feels rainier, because the sky is so grey, and it gets dark so early, and the rain sometimes comes down in little freezing pellets.

Denmark is a watery country, not just its long coastline and many rivers and lakes, but also the fact it is mostly near sea level. Like the Netherlands nearby, it is extremely vulnerable to flooding.

Climate changes in recent decades have made it worse, and sudden cloudbursts – or skybrud– cause a lot of damage.

So retrofitting Denmark for even more water in the future has become a national obsession.

One popular solution: opening up previously buried rivers and streams, particularly those that were paved over with concrete.

This "daylighting" of buried waterways allows them to collect excess water from storms, and beautifies cities as well.

This is the most recent episode in our 12-part series, The Danish Year.

Election posters are a colorful part of democracy in Denmark. In October, the campaigns swing into gear, and when the whistle blows on a set date at precisely noon, teams of poster-hangers cover the country with the faces of their candidates. It's highly competitive; It's against the law to take down posters once they're hung, so there's a big rush to get your party's poster up first.

So on that October afternoon, you'll see teams of young people rushing about Copenhagen, Aarhus, and countryside towns with ladders, and hardback posters, and zip ties, and measuring sticks, because all posters must be at least one-and-a-half meters below power lines.

There are a lot of young people available to do this because most Danish parties have a youth wing. There are also a lot of young candidates.

You'll often see the candidates themselves putting up posters with their own face on them.

Danish design in election posters

In a country famous for great design, Danish election posters are surprisingly uniform.

Every poster features one smiling face, a name, and a party color — and that's it.

No slogans, no promises, no policies. What does each candidate stand for? You'll have to look it up yourself.

With 13 national political parties (and many more local ones), democracy in Denmark gives voters plenty of choices.

Many Danes use online tools and quizzes to find the party that matches their beliefs before they vote.

Democracy in Denmark: Expats can vote

Foreigners can take part in democracy in Denmark at least at the local level. If you're an EU or UK citizen — or a non-EU citizen who has lived in a Danish municipality for at least four consecutive years — you can vote in local elections just like Danish citizens.

In Copenhagen, foreign residents make up around 15% of the potential voter base, though only a small share actually turn out on election day. To reach them, some Danish political parties take part in debates in English, hoping to win over international voters.

It's an interesting contrast in Danish politics: while some leaders actively court the foreign vote, others continue to promote stricter immigration policies.

That mix is part of what makes democracy in Denmark so unique — open, practical, and sometimes a little contradictory.

Denmark is a very good place to be a child, and to have children, yet the birthrate is dropping as it is in so many other countries. Some preschools have shut down due to lack of kids. Just this year Denmark reached a population of 6 million – a big landmark - but that's mostly due to immigration, not more children being born.

All the initiatives that experts recommend for increasing fertility in other countries already exist in Denmark, like child payments for parents, long parental leaves after childbirth, good universal day care, and tax-funded health care.

The Danish government even offers free fertility treatment for the first and second child, and it offers this to single women as well as committed couples.

Yet fertility is well below replacement levels, at about 1.5 children per woman in 2024.

Why are there not more babies ? My guess is long educational requirements for both men and women – you really can't get anywhere in business without a masters' degree - plus high housing prices in the big cities.

Enormous resources on kids

I've been spending a lot of time with Danish children lately. I make my living giving speeches about Danish working culture to corporate groups or academics, but in the summer there aren't many of those, so I like to take on other jobs and learn about Danish working culture from the inside. (You can't be an expert on Danish working culture without continually fresh experience of working in Denmark!)

This summer I've been working at several preschools that serve ages 3 to 6, a great age to work with. They're old enough to be verbal and express interesting ideas, but not so old that they are flabet, which is the Danish word for sassy, talking back.

The Danish government spends enormous resources on kids, in particular preschool kids.

A preschool in Copenhagen Denmark

One of the preschools where I work, owned by the Copenhagen municipality, is built just for that purpose, with high ceilings and big windows, a seemingly infinite number of toys, five separate playgrounds with trees and sandboxes, a pillow room for jumping around on rainy days, and an extensive kitchen where professional cooks prepare meals.

One day this summer we had a very nice baked salmon with rice and broccoli, followed by a snack of fresh strawberries, granola, and yogurt.

We adults practice "educational eating" which means we eat lunch with the small children to work on table manners and appropriate table conversation.

Read more at howtoliveindenmark.com.

As of this month, girls who turn 18 can be drafted into the Danish military.

This is new, even though girls in Norway and Sweden have been eligible for the draft for some time. Denmark is proud of its record on gender equality, so maybe it's a wonder it hasn't happened sooner. After all, more than half of the medical doctors in Denmark are female. More than half of the priests in Denmark are female. The prime minister is female. At only about 10% female, the military is clearly lagging behind.

The way the military draft in Denmark works is like this: Boys, and soon girls, who have just turned 18 are invited to an obligatory "Defense Day" where their physical and cognitive abilities are tested. If these are satisfactory, you get a lottery number, and if the Danish military doesn't get enough volunteers to meet its needs, you will be called up.

In recent years, there have been plenty of volunteers, so getting enough people hasn't been much of a problem. And getting into the Royal Life Guards, real-life soldiers who also protect the Danish Royal Family, remains very high status. It's where Denmark's future powerbrokers meet each other.

In 2023, there were about 5000 volunteers, and roughly 25% of them were female. At least in peacetime, the forces have attracted many young women who are athletes, almost as if it were a very disciplined form of an extreme sports challenge.

Read more at howtoliveindenmark.com.

Image created by Kay Xander Mellish via Midjourney, inspired by Danish painters Vilhelm Lundstrøm and CW Eckersberg. Buy the NFT on uncut.network.

There's a lovely May tradition in Denmark of setting a candle in the window on the evening of May 4. This is to commemorate the surrender of the Germans and the end of the Nazi occupation in 1945.

The Nazis imposed a blackout on Denmark to confuse the Allied air forces, so now that they were defeated, a candle in a window became a small symbol of rebellious light.

I intend to participate every year on May 4, but I often forget, and to be honest I see very few candles in windows these days.

A rememberance ceremony, forgotten

You'd have to be aged 85 or older now to remember the war, and Germany is one of Denmark's greatest friends and Allies.

In addition, the elderly who do remember the occupation and the blackout generally do not live with their families in Denmark, families to whom they might pass on the tradition.

Old people in Denmark primarily live alone, and municipal employees come to their house once or twice a week to help with cleaning and make sure they take their medicine.

When they can no longer take care of themselves, they're moved to a publicly-funded care home or a hospice, but this is generally only for the last few months of life.

Living cooperatives against loneliness

The elderly in Denmark are often lonely.

In India or the Middle East, older people usually live with their families; in the US, where I come from, they join "active adult" communities where they can golf and have affairs.

The Danish policy that encourages old people to remain in their homes as long as they can isolates them, in my opinion.

That's why the Danish government, mindful of the fact that the average age in Denmark is advancing quickly, is encouraging the idea of bofæelleskab, or living cooperatives.

That's when a number of older people live together in a house or large apartment, a bit like university students, with a shared kitchen and laundry facilities.

This gives them a bit of company and, not coincidentally, frees up a lot of individual houses for younger families to move in when the old people move out.

You're not the hip new designer or management trainee

Now, when I say old people, I'm talking about people over 67, which is the current Danish pension age. That will crawl up to age 70 for kids born today.

The problem for many people is that it's hard to get a job after age 60. No one wants to hire you as a hip new designer or innovative pharma developer or management trainee.

Older people at the very top of the success ladder often spend this time on various Boards of Directors, leveraging their years of business experience.

Below that I meet a lot of older people who have tossed their career and their specialized educations aside and become office managers, or work in retail, or work in kindergartens.

They're done climbing the career ladder and want something people-focused that is, and I quote, "something to do until I retire."

A word to honor the old in Denmark
Old people don't get any special respect in Danish culture.

I taught a group of Nepali students in Denmark once, and after the presentation in the Q&A period, they wanted to know if there were some special Danish word they could use to honor the elderly, an important part of their culture in Nepal.

But there's no specific word in Denmark to honor the elderly. Especially these days, when the people who are old now are the former 1960s hippies who got rid of honorifics like Herr Hansen and Fru Jensen.

The elderly today in Denmark are called by their first names, just like everyone else.

Read more at howtoliveindenmark.com.