Advertorial · Presented by Cedar & Tin · Decorah, Iowa · By Sarah Mitchell

“When these are gone, the mold goes in the bin.” Sig Haugen (69) is letting the final 412 pine cone nisses go at a special price. The Decorah pattern-maker is done with the markets.

In the Norway his grandmother came from, nobody ever saw the nisse — on a cold morning in the barn you only saw his breath. So Haugen built one you can watch breathe: a cone of incense goes into the hollow in his back, and the smoke comes out through his face.

The first thing people do is lean in. A cone of incense goes into the hollow in his back, and then, for about five seconds, nothing happens at all. Long enough to wonder whether it went out. Then a thin grey line comes out of the little man's mouth, climbs past his nose and breaks somewhere above his hat — and whoever is nearest usually stops talking.

Sig Haugen is sixty-nine, and he has been selling these at Christmas markets in northeast Iowa for twenty-nine years. He is aware of how the thing sounds written down. A gnome that smokes. He would rather you saw one first.

Every October he walks the bluffs above the Upper Iowa River with a feed sack over his shoulder, looking for pine cones — though not, he will tell you quickly, for just any pine cone.

“Most of them are nothing,” he says. “Crooked, or the scales are shut, or a squirrel got the top. Out of a full sack I might keep three.”

The three he keeps go on a drying rack above the furnace in his basement for six weeks, until the scales open even and stay open. Then he does something most people would not think to do with a pine cone: he turns it upside down and looks at it for a long time.

He saw a hat

Haugen spent thirty years in a pattern shop, making the wooden and resin masters that foundries cast metal parts from. It is a trade of molds, draft angles and tolerances, and almost nobody does it by hand anymore. When the shop wound down, he had a basement full of silicone, a steady hand, and no particular plan.

What he had instead was Nordic Fest. His grandparents came from Telemark, Decorah has been a Norwegian-American town since the 1850s, and Haugen has had a table at the summer festival and at the Vesterheim Christmas market for twenty-nine years running. First it was garden pieces. Then one autumn he picked up a fat white pine cone, turned it over in his hand, and saw a pointed hat.

A nisse is not a Santa Claus

The figure under that hat is not a Christmas elf, and Haugen is particular about the difference. In the Norway his grandmother came from, the nisse was a small, bearded old man who lived in the barn. He looked after the animals, he noticed everything, and on Christmas Eve he expected a bowl of rice porridge with a pat of butter on top. Treat him well and the farm did well. Forget the butter and the cows went dry.

“He isn't jolly,” Haugen says. “He's watchful. That's a different thing, and I think people miss it.”

“You never saw the nisse, my grandmother said. On a cold morning in the barn you only saw his breath.”

That line is the reason this particular figure exists. Haugen spent two winters working out how to cast a nisse you could actually see breathe — hollow enough inside for a cone of incense, with a channel that carries the smoke up and out through his face, slow and thin, the way breath leaves a man standing in a cold barn.

Forty-one tries

A hollow figure that breathes turns out to be a harder problem than it sounds, and Haugen went at it the way a pattern-maker goes at anything: he poured plain test bodies with no face and no beard, just a chamber and a channel, and numbered each one in pencil on the base.

The first ones smothered. An incense cone needs air, and a sealed chamber puts the ember out inside a minute. So he cut an intake low in the back — and then the smoke stopped coming out of the mouth and came out of the intake instead, because smoke goes wherever is easiest and not where you would like it to.

“Smoke wants to go straight up. You're asking it to go forward first and then up. It does not care what you want.”

Narrow the channel and the smoke backed up and seeped out of the seam. Widen it and the ribbon fell apart into a haze before it ever cleared the nose. The wall around the channel had to be thick enough not to crack from the heat and thin enough to leave the chamber any room. And the inside of the channel had to be smooth: the early ones carried the texture of the mold, and the smoke caught on it and stalled.

Number forty-one worked. It is still on the shelf above his bench, unpainted, the pencil mark on the base gone grey. Every mold he has cut since has that same chamber and that same channel inside it. The cone gives the hat; the inside is his.

How one gets made

From a kept cone, Haugen takes a silicone mold — the pattern-maker's part of the job, and the part that takes him longest. The figures are then poured in stone resin, a blend heavy with mineral powder, so that what comes out has real weight in the hand.

“A toy feels like nothing,” he says. “This should feel like something you set down carefully.”

• Cast from a real cone. Every scale, ridge and flaw on the hat came off one particular white pine cone picked up off the ground in northeast Iowa.
• Hand-finished face. The beard is brushed by hand after the cast cures overnight, which is why no two beards shade exactly alike.
• Weighted, not hollow-feeling. Roughly 10 oz of stone resin. It sits where you put it.
• Built around the smoke. The interior recess and the channel to the mouth were designed first; the figure was shaped around them.

How he breathes

A standard incense cone — the usual inch-high sort — sits in the recess inside the body. Lit and set down, the smoke leaves through the mouth rather than straight up. How long one lasts is down to whichever cone you buy: Haugen does not supply the incense and has no interest in starting.

“That's somebody else's trade,” he says. “Buy whatever you like the smell of. People around here use balsam.”

A note on use: the resin warms up while a cone is burning. Set him on a heat-safe surface — a tile, a saucer, a stone coaster — keep him clear of curtains and greenery, and don't leave anything burning unattended.

What the rest of the shelf is doing

Twenty-nine years behind a market table is a long time to watch people pick things up and set them down again, and Haugen has formed a view about Christmas decoration that he will share if you ask him.

“Most of it doesn't do anything,” he says. “It sits there looking like Christmas. You put it out, you look at it twice, and by the fifteenth you've stopped seeing it.”

Four things, he reckons, separate this one from the rest of the box:

• It changes while you are looking at it. Nothing else on a mantel moves. A lit figure holds a room's attention for twenty minutes at a time, which is twenty minutes more than a wreath manages all December.
• The texture is not an impression of something. Most molded decoration is plastic pressed to resemble wood, or stone, or a pine cone. These scales are a cast of actual scales, off an actual cone, down to the one that grew crooked.
• It is heavy. Pick up almost anything in the seasonal aisle and the weight tells you immediately what it is. This one has to be set down rather than put down.
• It is not jolly. The whole category is relentlessly cheerful. A nisse is watchful — he is the one who notices whether you remembered the butter. For a certain kind of person that is a relief.

And it does not expire on the twenty-sixth. A nisse was a year-round figure long before anyone attached him to Christmas; a good number of Haugen's go on a hall table or a desk and stay there, running cedar in March.

Only 412 left from the final pour

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Haugen is not sentimental about stopping. He is tired of loading a van in January, he says, and he would rather spend a winter at home for once. The mold goes in the bin when it is finished, and the cone it came from stays in the drawer.

“Five hundred came off that one mold,” he says. “That's enough barns watched over.”

This page is a paid advertisement published by Cedar & Tin. The Craftsman’s Review is a branded content format, not an independent news publication, and the account above is presented as told to the advertiser. Incense is not included. Burning incense produces heat and smoke: use on a heat-safe surface, keep away from flammable material, and never leave a burning cone unattended. Keep out of reach of children and pets.