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Our Story

The Story Behind The Julenissen Door

I’m Bethany C. Webb, and long before there was a book or a kit, there was just a small painted door leaning against the wall of our living room and a stack of notes piling up beside it.

Bethany C. Webb, author and illustrator of The Julenissen Door, in her North Carolina art studio

I wanted the magic to mean something

I wanted Christmas to feel enormous for my children the way it once felt for me. But I also wanted the magic to carry something with it. December has a way of getting loud. The calendar fills, the lists grow, and the season quietly turns into a countdown of things to buy. I kept looking for a family Christmas tradition that was quieter than that, one built on imagination and on noticing other people, and I could not find the one I had in mind.

Following my husband’s Norwegian heritage

When we began having children, I wanted our Christmas to hold onto my husband’s Norwegian heritage. It meant everything to his Bestemor, who left Norway for the United States in the 1950s and carried her Norwegian Christmas close to her heart, especially the tradition of the Julenissen. She even crocheted a little Julenissen for us as a wedding gift.

We wanted our children to grow up knowing those traditions, along with the ones from my Italian family. My side came over from Italy, so in true Italian form, those traditions found their way in mostly through food: homemade pasta and meatballs for Christmas dinner, Italian nut roll for dessert, and our yearly Feast of the Seven Fishes gathering, which is never complete without a platter of homemade pepperoni rolls. Two heritages woven together into one set of traditions our children will always remember.

That search led me straight into Norwegian Christmas folklore and the old stories of the nisse and the Julenissen: a small, watchful figure who lives just out of sight, who is looked after with a bowl of porridge, and who is famous for being helpful, and occasionally for a bit of mischief. You can read more about that folklore in our guide to Norwegian Christmas traditions and the Julenissen.

Those stories gave me the character. The kindness gave me the tradition. I wove them together into something of our own: a little door for the Julenissen, and a note left outside it each night telling him the kind things we had done that day.

A little door in our own living room

We set the door out on the first of December. The children wrote their notes, some of them barely legible, and left them outside it before bed. Some mornings a small kindness had happened in the house overnight. Some mornings the mittens were in the cookie jar. It became the part of Christmas they asked about first, and it kept them looking outward through a month that usually asks children to look inward at their own lists.

Watercolor illustration of the Julenissen Door hidden among books on a bookshelf

Writing and illustrating the book

After years of doing this with my own family, I wrote and illustrated the story so other families could begin it too. Every illustration in the book is my own original watercolor work, painted page by page. My artwork has been recognized three times in the New York Times Wirecutter gift guides.

Every door painted by hand in North Carolina

Bethany C. Webb painting a wooden Julenissen door on the workbench of her North Carolina art studio

Each door is a solid piece of maple that I paint by hand in my studio in North Carolina, which is why the run is small. It is meant to be a keepsake that comes back out of the box every December and eventually gets handed down.

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