 If you enjoy watching Common Ground online, please consider making a tax-deductible donation at lptv.org. Common Ground is brought to you by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund, with money from the vote of the people November 4th, 2008. I'm Jan Kittelsen, reading you from the Nordic Showcase, which is sponsored by Bemidji Lodge 500, Sons of Norway. We are at the Calgary Lutheran Church, and people are flooding in to taste our tasty treats from Norway. The purpose of Showcase is threefold. It is to show the people of the community and all who come, what it is that we enjoy and experience in Sons of Norway, and hopefully to interest them in joining our lodge, and also to develop camaraderie among members. And one of my personal goals is to get every member of the lodge involved in doing something for Nordic Showcase, and we've done pretty well. We have a lot of members here and we have a lot of guests here. It is turning out to be a fantastic day. Everybody here will want to taste our samples of rosettes, krumkake, kransekake, rumigrit, rumibrud, smurbrud. My tongue doesn't like to roll around those Rs. Many of you are familiar with lefse, but some of these other tasty treats were new to me even today. The people who have made and are making the foods are mostly members, but one member will get another one and a helper, and so that's a good thing. And a few people who are not members have volunteered and some of them we have asked. If I know someone, if somebody on our committee knows someone who does some Nordic craft, we ask them, would you like to participate in Nordic Showcase? So we have people here participating from other towns. The dancers are from Detroit Lakes and the crocheter and the felter are from Rushford, Minnesota, and Bob Paulson is from Shevlin, and I have seen guests come in from Bagley, so this is good. We like this. The goal is to let everybody in the community know what Sons of Norway is about and also to help interest people in joining Sons of Norway. We had a very successful Nordic Showcase five years ago in June of 2010, and we're hoping that this will be equally successful or more so. It's not something we could do every year. The committee has been working on it. I think we started in October and really ramped up after the first of the year, so it's a big deal. There are about 30 booths here today. Each booth has at least one Sons of Norway member manning it and some have more than one and some have recruited helpers outside of Sons of Norway, which is just fine with us. I'm George Olson. My wife and I, Karen Olson, are from North Home. Today we're here to make potato lefse. It's a mixture of potatoes, flour, sugar and butter mixed together. We start over here. We roll the mixture into a ball about the size of a golf ball. My wife flours it and then rolls it real thin. I come along with my lefse stick, lift it off of the pastry cover, fold it first one side on the grill, then we have to wait until it cooks on one side and we'll flip it over on the other. Besides potato lefse, there are many other lefses, at least 20 that do not have potatoes in them, so in Norwegian this is called potet lefse. The bubbles on the top of the sheet of lefse, you can tell that this has been rolled good because it's cooking evenly. I check underneath once in a while to see how it's coming. Then I flip it over and it'll cook on the other side. A lot of times at home we have it fresh off the griddle with butter and brown sugar. Here today we're having butter and sugar. Sometimes people use cinnamon. Sometimes they roll it up with a hot dog and it's called vorma polsa. I put my pickled herring in it, actually. Some people put scrambled eggs and bacon and roll it up. Then when it's done, flip it over and you have your sheet of lefse. That's pretty much the process there. I'm actually president of the Bemidji Lodge and the cultural director, and we decided it was time for another event, so Jan Kiddelsen was good enough to head it up again and I think she's done a fine job. It's a great crowd today. I'm interested in anything that shows off the Norwegian and Scandinavian heritage, so this is a great representative sample of everything Norwegian and Scandinavian. It's a great day. It brings to the forefront our culture and people are more aware of it. It's a win-win situation for the community, I believe. Hi, my name is Susie Rowland. Jeff Turn is my name. I'm actually from Melbourne, Australia. We're at the Norwegian Showcase in Bemidji, Minnesota. I'm here visiting Janelle and Phil Teague of Beninji. They've actually bought me along today because Janelle's Swedish background and she bought me along this event today to see what happens with this festival. I'm not involved with the Showcase, but I belong to the Sons of Norway in Boston, Minnesota. And we wanted to come over and see what they do here because we're interested in doing something like this at our own Sons of Norway. I enjoy the robo-grit most. It's so good, it's warm, and it reminds me of what my mother-in-law used to make many years ago. Some of the chip carving, the wood carving, the lefse making. The sandwiches are fantastic. They're like little pieces of art. So far I've had a walk around, had a few nibbles. Yes, it's very interesting the different varieties of the food from the Scandinavian area. A lot of clothing on sale, hand art craft type stuff on sale. There's a gentleman down here that's done wood carving. That was very interesting to see that he had a wooden stool there that he's spent seven years during the winter months carving this wooden stool. I'm not sure what the name is in Scandinavia, but that was very interesting to talk to him. The bunad making. I am interested in making my own bunad, and there's a lady here that has made one for herself and her daughter and her granddaughter, and I wanted to find out some more about it. The benefits for this community are that so many of them have Scandinavian heritage and they get to see everything that is all about Scandinavian, more than just Norwegian. They're Swedish and Danish, and it's just a good way for them all to be exposed to it. I think that it's a wonderful way for everybody to get introduced to it, especially if you don't know anything. There's history, there's social part of it. It's just a great way for everybody to get involved. Anybody is welcome to join Sons of Norway. You don't have to be Norwegian. When the organization started, you had to be Norwegian to join. Well, then they got a little more lax and you had to be married to a Norwegian to join. And then a little more lax and you had to know a Norwegian to join. But anymore you don't have to know anybody Norwegian to join. We are about learning about the culture of Norway and I think education, showing people, demonstrating to people some of the Nordic traditions and culture. It makes me feel really good that there are so many people turning out for this because Bemidji is, I tell my kids, Bemidji is a happening place. There are always lots of things going on. If you are interested in our Norwegian culture, we're happy to have you join. If you enjoyed this segment of Lakeland Public Television's Common Ground, consider making a contribution at lptv.org.