Holidays in Norway

Official national public holidays. Regional and religious observances may vary by area.

About Time in Norway

A Stick That Told the Farming Year

Long before printed calendars reached rural Norway, farmers kept time with a flat wooden stick called a primstav, its name blending the Latin prima with the Norwegian word for stick. Notched along both edges to mark every day of the year, it carried carved symbols at the dates that mattered: a key for Saint Peter's Day in February, a warning that lake ice might no longer hold; other marks for planting, shearing, brewing and the days on which farmhands' contracts began or ended. The oldest surviving example dates to 1457, and the tradition likely reaches back further still into pre-Christian practice, later absorbing dozens of Catholic saints' days even after the Reformation had formally done away with their veneration.

The stick's most consistent feature was its two faces. One side, beginning 14 April, covered the light half of the year; the other, beginning 14 October, covered the dark half, and on each of those two dates Norwegian households would physically turn the primstav over, a small domestic ritual that doubled as the traditional day for hiring or dismissing farm labour. Because the symbols were carved by hand and passed down regionally rather than printed centrally, meanings drifted: a mark near the coast might flag the start of a fishing season that meant nothing to a farmer in the interior. The primstav lost its practical function only gradually after Norway adopted the Gregorian calendar, remaining in everyday use in some rural districts well into the twentieth century.

A Country That Ran on Two Clocks at Once

Norway came to standard time later than most of Europe, largely because it had little need of one before the railways arrived. When the electric telegraph first linked Kristiania, now Oslo, to Drammen in 1855, operators simply used Copenhagen time to coordinate messages, switching in 1866 to Kristiania's own local time, seven minutes later than the Danish capital's. Railways then compounded the confusion rather than resolving it: trains running from the city's eastern terminus kept Kristiania time, while those departing from the western terminus a short walk away ran on Drammen local time, a genuine discrepancy of several minutes between two stations in the same city.

The country did not fix this until 1 January 1895, when it adopted Central European Time, aligning the whole nation, at midnight, clocks in the capital moved forward by seventeen minutes to match the new 15-degree-east reference meridian rather than the city's own longitude. Even then the change came ahead of full railway unification, since the line connecting the eastern and western networks was not completed until 1909. Daylight saving proved a far less settled matter over the following century, tried and abandoned repeatedly through the First World War, the German occupation, and again in the 1960s amid public controversy, before Norway finally adopted the seasonal changeover it still uses today in 1980.

A Month That Decided Two Fates

At roughly three in the afternoon on 14 December 1911, Roald Amundsen and four companions planted the Norwegian flag at the geographic South Pole, having kept their true destination secret from rivals until their ship was already at sea. Amundsen had originally aimed for the North Pole, but on learning in 1909 that Frederick Cook and Robert Peary both claimed to have already reached it, he quietly redirected his entire expedition south, choosing dogs, skis and a base camp sixty miles closer to the pole than his British competitor Robert Falcon Scott.

Scott's own party reached the same spot on 18 January 1912, more than a month behind, having relied on motorised sledges and Siberian ponies rather than dogs. It was a fatal delay in every sense: weakened by exhaustion and cold on the return march, Scott and his remaining companions died in their tent, pinned down by a blizzard just eleven miles short of a supply depot that would very likely have saved them. Amundsen's party, by contrast, made it back to base camp on 25 January 1912, having covered roughly 1,400 nautical miles in 99 days, a margin of preparation and pacing that turned a matter of weeks into the difference between a triumphant return and a tragedy still recounted in polar history a century later.

Seven Hours That Became a Genre

On 27 November 2009, the Norwegian public broadcaster NRK aired something no channel had seriously attempted before: an unedited, seven-hour-and-sixteen-minute broadcast of the entire train journey between Bergen and Oslo, filmed from the driver's cab with nothing but ambient sound, timed to mark the Bergen Line's hundredth anniversary. Rather than cut away during the route's 182 tunnels, producers filled the darkness with archival photographs and interviews with railway historians, letting the programme run at exactly the pace of the real journey rather than any edited version of it.

Around 1.2 million viewers, close to a quarter of Norway's population, tuned in, and the format, which came to be known as sakte-TV, or slow television, only grew bolder from there. In 2011, NRK broadcast the full 134-hour voyage of the coastal ferry Hurtigruten from Bergen to Kirkenes, drawing an audience share that peaked above a third of the country and prompting crowds to gather on shorelines hoping to be seen live on camera as the ship passed. The genre has since been exported to broadcasters from Britain to Sweden, built entirely around the idea that an event told at its own real duration, with nothing sped up, cut or dramatised, could hold a television audience just as well as one compressed for convenience.

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