Kekri closed the old Finnish farming year: a feast for the living and the dead, a masked goat at the door and a week off for farmhands. How it is kept today.
When the grain was in the barn, the cattle indoors for the winter, the root vegetables
buried and the autumn slaughter done, the farming year in old Finland was over, and the
house celebrated kekri. There was no fixed date. Each household held it when its own
autumn work was finished, somewhere between Michaelmas and All Saints’ Day, and the
Rural Culture Foundation, which runs the kekri revival today, calls it the biggest feast
of the year at the turning point of the harvest.
When: after the harvest, between Michaelmas (29 September) and All Saints’ Day
2026: All Saints’ Day falls on Saturday 31 October
Other names: köyri, köyry, keyri and keuri
Best known figure: the kekripukki, a masked “goat” at the door
Kekri ended the old agricultural year and began the next. The Finnish Heritage Agency’s
living heritage wiki describes a period of about twelve days at the turn of October and
November that levelled the solar and the lunar year, a time between times. The dead were
thought to be about in that season, and they had to be treated well, with food and
warmth, so that the coming year would go well too. The Catholic feast of All Saints fell
in the same season, and the two blended with the older Finnish beliefs. Finns still
remember their dead on the All Saints’ weekend by taking candles to the graves.
It was also a holiday for farmhands and maids, who got about a week off. Their year of
service used to change earlier in the autumn, at Michaelmas, the servants’ moving day.
The kekripukki was a young person in a fur coat turned inside out, with a mask of birch
bark. Spoons, cabbages or sheep shears served as horns, and odd objects hung from the
coat. The kekri goats went from house to house asking for treats. Kekri.fi calls the
kekripukki the model for the Finnish joulupukki, the Christmas goat who became Santa.
Kekri events in Kajaani, Oulu, Iisalmi and Suomenlinna in Helsinki have burned a
Nobody was to go hungry at kekri, because a thin feast meant a thin harvest.
Abundance was the point. The table was laid with lamb, home-made sausages, dairy, root
vegetables and autumn berries, and porridge and gruel cooked from the new grain. Beer was
drunk freely so that the barley would grow. The painting at the top of this page, Juho
Rissanen’s kekri evening from 1903, shows the stronger end of the same custom.
A turning point of the year was a time for telling the future. People cast tin and read
its shape, and watched omens for the weather and the next harvest. Carved turnip lanterns
called kitupiikki and bonfires kept restless spirits at bay, and the sauna was heated
Kekri has been revived since the 2000s, in towns as well as in the countryside. The Rural Culture Foundation started its project to make kekri a national
feast in 2009, around local food, community and a little mystery. For Finland’s centenary
in 2017 the Rural Women’s Advisory Organisation counted more than 150 kekri events, and
since 2021 whole kekri weeks have been promoted. Kekri is often presented as a Finnish
alternative to Halloween, which falls in the same weeks, with the harvest table at its
Late October is when Lapland turns dark in the evenings and the northern lights season is
in full swing. In 2026 the full moon of 26 October lights the nights in the week before
All Saints’ Day, and the new moon of 9 November brings the darkest sky that follows. Our