Solvang Danish Days

On the Saturday and Sunday mornings of Danish Days, breakfast is served in the street at Copenhagen Drive and First Street in downtown Solvang. The plate is æbleskiver, the round Danish pancakes, with a beverage. For a few dollars more it comes with medisterpølse, Danish sausage. At the 2026 festival the two plates cost $12 and $15, and service ran from 8:30 until noon. Tickets bought in advance let a diner skip the onsite ticket line.

Solvang Danish Days runs Friday through Sunday each September. General admission is free, and the grounds are the town itself: Solvang Park and its gazebo, the craft stalls on First Street, the Midgaard Pavilion stage in Parking Lot 2, and the parade routes along Copenhagen Drive, Alisal Road, Mission Drive and Atterdag Road. The 2026 edition, held September 18 through 20, was counted the 89th. Its theme was “Solen over dalen,” which the organizers render as “something to the effect of ‘Sun over the Valley’” in Danish. The non-profit Solvang Danish Days Foundation runs the weekend, and its Viking Beer & Wine Garden at the Midgaard Pavilion raises money for the foundation.

Friday by candlelight

The weekend opens quietly. On Friday morning in 2026, John Clark, in character as Hans Christian Andersen, read tales at the Solvang Library, and the Elverhøj Museum of History & Art opened its Celebration of Danish Culture and fine art exhibit. By four in the afternoon the Viking Beer & Wine Garden was open to those 21 and over, and The Rincons were playing a free concert on the Midgaard Pavilion stage. Nearby, at Copenhagen and Second Street, Boy Scout Troops 41 and 87 ran an axe-throwing arena at $10 for 10 throws. Throwers must be 13 or older and wear closed-toe shoes.

At 7:30 the Torchlight Parade forms at Alisal Road and Laurel Avenue. Anyone may walk in it, and candles are provided. The procession moves south down Alisal and ends at the Midgaard Pavilion stage. The Opening Ceremonies follow at eight. In 2026 they introduced the Danish Maid, Ainsley Haws, a welcome from Solvang Mayor David Brown, and the Grand Marshals, Roberta and Kevin Skidmore. Bent Olsen and Steen Skellerup led the crowd in the Danish and American national anthems. Holders of the “Dane For A Day” package were given a one-ounce pour of akvavit for a celebratory “Skal.” The Fresno Great Danes and the Solvang Danish Dancers then performed a Velkommen Street Dance to live music until 9:30. At eight on each night of the weekend, a guided ghost walk sets out through the town with EMF meters and dowsing rods.

Saturday on First Street and Copenhagen

After the street breakfast, the Old World Artisans Marketplace opens on First Street, beside Solvang Park. Its stalls carry woodworking, papercutting, rosemaling, fabric art, jewelry and pottery, along with what the schedule calls “the ever-popular Danish Sisterhood Booth.” In 2026 master papercutter Rick James Marzullo gave demonstrations there at midday and again in the afternoon. In past years the Viking encampment has stood next to the marketplace. The 2025 schedule named the Vikings of Bjornstad, a living-history group concentrating on the Viking age.

Music moves through the village all day. The Solvang Village Band rides the Carlsberg Beer Wagon. The Fresno Danish Dancers, the Solvang Village Folk Dancers, and the accordion players Suzie Swenson and Howie Howe roam the streets, and the Fossemalle Dancers took the Pavilion stage at nine. In Solvang Park, Kid’s Korner offers face painting, games, a LEGO tent and bounce houses from Luna’s Jumps. Rune reader Tracey Boyer gives free readings under the trees. Scott Meltzer and Katrine Spang-Hanssen, performing as Comedy Industries, do tricks and jokes at the gazebo.

At 11:30 the Æbleskiver Eating Contest begins at the Midgaard Pavilion. It is free and open to all ages, and the winner is whoever eats the most æbleskiver in five minutes. The 2025 announcement described the contest as “all hands-free,” and noted that competitive eater Naader Reda was returning to try to beat his own record from 2024.

At one o’clock the organist James Welch plays the pipe organ at Bethania Lutheran Church, 603 Atterdag Road. The 2026 program was billed “Bach’s Lunch: A Musical Smorgasbord!” and promised folk tunes, hits from opera and Broadway, and some Bach. Welch descends from Danes of Fjenneslev, Denmark; his grandmother was a Sorensen. The festival’s own page notes the concert “is often a standing-room-only affair.” A $5 donation is suggested.

The main Danish Days Parade steps off at 2:30. It carries the Village Band atop the Carlsberg wagon, floats, equestrians and the Village Dancers. The route turns east on Copenhagen Drive, north on Alisal Road, west on Mission Drive and south on Atterdag Road. It then runs east on Copenhagen and south on Second Street, and finishes through Molle Way behind the Solvang Festival Theater. Anyone may enter, at no charge. Free concerts fill the Pavilion stage into the night. In 2026 the last set, by The Molly Ringwald Project, ran until ten.

Sunday’s children’s parade and the Maid

Sunday repeats the breakfast, the market and the contest, and the Elverhøj Museum opens free of charge. The museum stands at 1624 Elverhoy Way, in the hand-built house that painter and sculptor Viggo Brandt-Erichsen and his wife, the painter Martha “Patt” Mott Brandt-Erichsen, began in 1949. They modeled it on the large 18th-century farmhouses of Jutland. It opened as a museum in May 1988. During Danish Days its docents demonstrate spinning and bobbin lacemaking in folk costume. In 2022 the museum returned to the festival after a two-year pandemic pause, and its executive director, Esther Jacobsen Bates, described the program: “Guests can make Danish paper crafts, get creative with Viking rune stamps, dress up like Vikings and snap selfies, try their hand at making aebleskiver, and shop for Danish-inspired keepsakes.” In 2026 John Clark gave his last Andersen reading of the weekend there, and the Sage City Band played the Solvang Park gazebo while Solvang Brewing Co. poured from a tent in the park.

At 2:30 the Children’s Parade leaves Atterdag Square, at Atterdag Road and Copenhagen Drive. Children and families walk down Copenhagen to Solvang Park, costumes encouraged. The Danish Maid then closes the weekend at the gazebo. In 2026 Bill Agin and Territorial Law played afterward.

The Danish Maid has presided over the festival since the 1960s. Foundation board members appoint her, and she serves a year as goodwill ambassador. Ainsley Haws, the 2026 Maid, is a fifth-generation Danish American with ancestors from four places in Denmark. The title often runs in families. Stephanie Pedersen, Maid in 2023, followed Janet Pedersen (1974) and Lisa Larsen Pedersen (1977), and was quoted in a headline as saying, “I feel like I am living a fairytale.”

The Madrid family has held the title four times: Glenda Jaeger Madrid in 1971, her daughter Ashlee in 1999, and Ashlee’s daughters Aleena in 2022 and Addie in 2025. Their Solvang line goes back to Viggo Tarnow, who came from Copenhagen in 1914 and later taught at Solvang’s Atterdag Folk School. Johannes Jaeger arrived from Tindbæk, Denmark, in 1948, “with hope in his heart and carpentry tools in his hands.” He became a partner in the Madsen & Jaeger Contracting Firm, which built the large windmill on Alisal Road and the Solvang Brewing Company windmill on Mission Drive. Both still stand. “I hope this weekend reminds you – just like it reminds me – of where we come from and why we keep returning,” Addie Madrid said in 2025.

A party for the Silver Anniversary

Solvang began in January 1911, when the Danish-American Colony Corporation bought almost 9,000 acres in the Santa Ynez Valley. It was the plan of three Danish immigrant educators and pastors, Benedict Nordentoft, Jens Møller Gregersen and Peder Pedersen Hornsyld. They named the colony Solvang, “sunny field,” and meant land-sale profits to build a folk school and a Lutheran church. The settlers learned English and sent their children to the local grammar school, but they spoke Danish among themselves and formed Danish fraternal organizations.

For the town’s 25th anniversary, June 5 to 7, 1936, residents held a three-day Danish party. The town welcomed visitors in print: “if you feel at home—as we sincerely want you to—it will be because you are at home; at home in a Danish colony celebrating its anniversary in Danish-American manner.” The weekend opened with a torchlight procession and went on through folk dancing, pageants, plays, a barbecue, street dancing, a banquet, a parade, a picnic and an evening concert. Solvang held another celebration on July 17 and 18, 1937, under the name Nationalfesten Danmarks Dagene, “National Festival Denmark’s Days.” By 1938 it was simply Danish Days. For many years the Solvang Business Men’s Association sponsored it.

No Danish Days were held during World War II, when Solvang turned to war relief. The festival resumed in 1946 and drew almost 10,000 people. A reporter from The Saturday Evening Post came that year, and his article ran in January 1947: “Solvang…a spotless Danish village that blooms like a rose in California’s charming Santa Ynez Valley.” The Elverhøj Museum credits the article and its photographs with starting a stream of visitors. In the same postwar years the town remodeled itself in Danish Provincial style and built its windmills.

The crowds grew past what the town could manage, and Danish Days was cancelled in 1959 and 1960. Solvang turned instead to its Golden Jubilee, held September 22 to 24, 1961, a celebration “to be remembered always.” The program included æbleskiver breakfasts, a torchlight parade, gymnastic performances, a street dance and a historical pageant parade. The festival has been held every year since.

In early 1995 the Solvang City Council asked long-established Danish families and others to form a non-profit to run the festival. The first board of the Solvang Danish Days Foundation was Ken Andersen, Brenda Anderson, Hans Birkholm, Max Hanberg, Howard Petersen, David Rasmussen and Henry Skytt. Besides the festival, the foundation gives scholarships to students at Santa Ynez Valley Union High School and sells “Win a Trip to Denmark” raffle tickets. One visitor bought two of those tickets at a Solvang bakery in July 2025, won, and spent a week in Copenhagen the following July.

“A lot of us who live here take its Danish roots for granted,” the festival’s spokeswoman, Anna Ferguson-Sparks, said in 2016, “but the founders really brought the traditions and architecture of Denmark and built the foundations of the community.” The 90th anniversary festival is set for Friday through Sunday, September 17 to 19, 2027.