Julebukking in Decorah

A knock at the door, and random masked strangers

Decorah always felt like it was built to survive winter, not enjoy it. The cold didn’t nibble at you—it crawled straight through your coat and took up residence in your bones. The Norwegians who settled there understood the cold. They’d lived with storms that could erase entire villages, so when they brought julebukking with them—this odd little winter ritual—it didn’t feel like an import. It felt like a warning that old traditions don’t die; they just change latitudes.

Julebukking was never a spectacle. No carolers in neat rows. No cheerful postcards. No marching band in red hats. It was smaller, stranger, and more intimate. It thing started with a knock after dark—the kind that froze a room mid-sentence. A knock with weight to it. A knock that carried old-country ghosts on its back.

The children always heard it first. They stiffened like animals catching a scent. Adults tried to look unconcerned, but the winter air came into the house in a new way when julebukk night rolled around. Everyone felt it.

Then the door opened.

Let the guessing begin. The visitors could not take off
their masks untilthey were recognized and named.

Three or four figures stood there, wrapped in layers of wool and desperation, with old sacks tied over their faces. Holes cut too wide or too narrow. Shawls that had survived two oceans. Someone always wore a goat mask—a crude wooden one that looked like it had been carved during a long night when the wind wouldn’t let a man sleep.

These masked visitors didn’t speak. They stepped inside like they belonged in your house, like they’d always been there, like they’d crawled up out of the cold itself. And then they sang.

The songs were half-remembered, half-invented. Harmonies collided. Voices cracked. It was like someone had ripped open a slice of old Norway, and the sound came stumbling out, disoriented but determined. The house filled with cinnamon, smoke, and this strange chorus of familiar strangers.

The guessing game began. Every twitch, every shift of weight, every muffled laugh gave away a clue. Kids stared hard enough to bend time. Adults pretended they weren’t playing, but they leaned forward too, caught in the same spell.

You couldn’t take the mask off until someone said your name. That was the rule. A rule older than the prairie. Older than the farmhouses. Maybe older than the people who kept it alive. You had to be recognized before you could step back into your proper face.

When someone finally guessed, the entire room loosened. The masks came off. People laughed the way you laugh after almost slipping on ice—part relief, part adrenaline.

Then came the coffee strong enough to unseat a politician. Cookies. Lefse. A piece of cake if there were any left. The julebukkers thawed around the stove. They talked about nothing and everything—new babies, deep snow, somebody’s brother still stuck on the Atlantic crossing. It was small talk with a pulse.

The unmasking.

They didn’t stay long. That was part of the design. In, out, no lingering. The masks went back on. They said their goodbyes and stepped into the darkness, swallowed by the winter night. Their footprints filled with fresh snow almost before the door shut.

Inside, the house felt different. The kids stared at the door as if willing it to open again. Sometimes it did. Sometimes the night went still again, like it was holding its breath.

Families returned to their chores—mending, banking the fire, whispering guesses about who else was out roaming the dark. Decorah wasn’t large, but julebukking made it feel like every door in town mattered. Like the whole place was stitched together by the knocks, off-key songs, and strange visits from people pretending to be someone else so they could be themselves again.

The beauty of the tradition was its simplicity. No decorations. No schedule. No church bulletin announcing it. Just masks, memory, and a willingness to step into the cold carrying a song from another continent. And underneath all the strangeness—beneath the flour sacks, the goat mask, the mismatched notes—there was a reminder of the place they left behind. A way to keep the old world alive in the new one. A way of saying, “We haven’t vanished.”

Decorah held onto julebukking longer than most towns. Maybe because the people there understood winter can make you small, and being remembered—even in a strange, masked way—can make you bigger again. Maybe because when you open your door in the dead of winter and let a little wildness in, the night doesn’t feel as empty.

In the end, julebukking lasted not because it was loud or joyful or orderly, but because it wasn’t. It was a knock at the wrong time of night, a handful of voices in mismatched harmony, a brief spark of warmth in a season that needed it desperately.

Sometimes that’s all a tradition needs — a little weirdness and a house willing to let it in.