Tim Tangherlini, professor of Nordic folklore at the University of California at Berkeley, gives a talk about the historical origins of American holiday practices during Profs and Pints at Barlett Hall in San Francisco on Dec. 18, 2024. (Beth LaBerge/KQED)
Every morning during the holidays, KQED’s Senior Operations Manager Tiff Mitchell wakes up her seven-year-old daughter Kahlea with a mission: find Cookie, their elf, on a shelf.
Cookie is a miniature doll with a perpetual smile dressed in a red costume with white trim. Every night, Mitchell hides Cookie in a new place. The story goes that Cookie watches Kahlea during the day and reports back to Santa at night whether she has been naughty or nice.
Tiff Mitchell’s Elf on a Shelf ‘Cookie’ takes a relaxing bubble bath. (Tiff Mitchell/KQED)
This is only the second year Mitchell has done Elf on a Shelf, and while both mother and daughter enjoy the tradition, Mitchell admits she has no idea where it comes from. She has questions.
“ Who thought of this, and how did it get here? Were there older elves?” Mitchell wondered.
While Elf on a Shelf is a relatively new tradition here in the United States (it gained popularity after the publication of a book in 2005), the cute elf is a descendant of a much more mischievous and, at times, homicidal brand of elves stretching all the way back to folk tales from 15th century Scandinavia.
That, and the Scandinavian origins of other Christmas traditions, was the subject of a recent talk by Timothy Tangherlini, a professor of Scandinavian folklore at UC Berkeley.
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Instead of a college lecture hall, the talk was held at a downtown San Francisco brewery, called Bartlett Hall, as part of the Profs and Pints lecture series, which hosts college professors to talk about their field of study in bars, cafés, company offices, and other off-campus venues across the country.
Tim Tangherlini, professor of Nordic folklore at the University of California at Berkeley, gives a talk about the historical origins of American holiday practices during a Profs and Pints event at Barlett Hall in San Francisco on Dec. 18, 2024. (Beth LaBerge/KQED)
“This is not something I usually do,” Tangherlini admitted at the start of the talk.
“While my students might be drinking heavily while I lecture, they’re probably doing it clandestinely,” Tangherlini joked. “But I understand the beer here is very good, and I think the more beer we have, the better this lecture will be.”
Tangherlini said the Christmas elves we know today are folklore descendants of household spirits known throughout Scandinavia since the 15th century. They’re called Nisse in Denmark.
“The Nisse doesn’t really care about the humans,” Tangherlini said. “They really care about the farm.”
They were about the size of children, had beards, were exclusively male, and were very strong — Tangherlini said they could do the work of 10 or 15 farm hands.
“Nisse weren’t really tied to Christmas except that they would expect to get their annual bowl of porridge either on Christmas Eve or New Years,” Tangherlini said.
The price for not keeping the Nisse happy could be fatal.
“If you don’t feed him the porridge with butter, he gets pissed off in ways that you can’t even imagine,” Tangherlini explained. “They were more than mischievous. They would kill you.”
Shalaka Phadnis listens to Tim Tangherlini, professor of Nordic folklore at the University of California at Berkeley, give a talk about the historical origins of American holiday practices during a Profs and Pints event at Barlett Hall in San Francisco on Dec. 18, 2024. (Beth LaBerge/KQED)
Tangherlini said the Nisse folklore also served an important function for rural farmers in helping explain their lives.
“People try to understand why the farm over there seems to be doing so well, and you’ve got a ready-made story in the idea that ‘Oh, they must have a Nisse,’” Tangherlini said.
The stories and depictions of Nisse began to change in the 1800s. Tangherlini describes it as the Nisse becoming domesticated. They lost their beards, they got smaller, cuter, and they started being associated with Christmas.
“It’s the rise of both a reading public and a middle class that has disposable income to spend on things like Christmas presents and Christmas decorations, that creates a demand for various types of decorations, and the Nisse kind of gets caught up in that,” Tangherlini said.
One of those decorations involved paper cutouts of Danish Nisse that had tabs on them so you could hang them on your bookshelf. Once American advertising got a hold of the Nisse, the change was irreversible.
“ The Coca-Cola ads of the mid-20th century are the best known, where Santa has all of these elves helping him out at the North Pole,” Tangherlini said. “Those images of elves are mapped directly from this emerging sort of commercialization and domestication of the Danish Nisse.”
A crowd listens to Tim Tangherlini, professor of Nordic folklore at the University of California at Berkeley, give a talk about the historical origins of American holiday practices during a Profs and Pints event at Barlett Hall in San Francisco on Dec. 18, 2024. (Beth LaBerge/KQED)
Among those attending the talk was Orion West. She said she wanted to learn more about the non-Christian roots of holiday traditions, as she originally thought Elf on a Shelf came from the movie “Elf.”
“It’s much more sinister than I realized,” West said. “I thought it was a tradition from a modern kids movie, and to know it comes from a Scandinavian tradition of elves who will murder you if you offend them and who have different morals from ours — so they’re easy to offend — that’s really interesting. Much scarier than I thought.”
Tangherlini said he enjoyed giving a lesson outside the classroom and that the boisterous holiday crowd that showed up on a dark, cold night — beers and food in hand — shows why people are so drawn to folk stories, especially during the holidays.
“These are the things that help us create identity and create community,” Tangherlini said, “and they’re these practices that might seem inconsequential but actually have a huge importance in our everyday life.”
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