South Dakota town with two residents enchants visitors at Christmas with nostalgia and community

NORA, S.D. – On a nearly invisible corner of 307th Street and 475th Avenue in the middle of Union County, South Dakota, where farmland hugs you from everywhere and the topography begins to roll, is the Nora Store.

It's here where you find Father Christmas.

He has the bellowing laugh and the twinkling eyes and the type of generosity in which you wait for him to pull a candy cane out of his pocket. Even more than the jolly old elf, he is the humble and charming Mike Pedersen. He plays a restored pipe organ in the middle of nowhere in what has become a gathering spot at Christmas for people from across the Midwest to enjoy warm apple cider and sing carols.

He has been doing this for 35 years.

“I just want people to leave feeling blessed and refreshed,” Pedersen, 73, says. “I never dreamed it could have turned into something like this.”

How a house painter came to Christmas caroling

Nora is an unincorporated town in southeast South Dakota with a population of two: Pedersen and his neighbor, Luke Lyle.

There first was the Ronning General Store in the late 1800s, next to a creamery where farmers brought in their milk every Tuesday and Friday and became well known for its Sunshine butter brand, Pedersen says.

After that closed in 1906, the Nora Store opened on the same corner promptly in 1907, notably selling vinegar for farming and flour sacks for handmade clothing.

After the Nora general store closed in 1962, it would be a decade until Pedersen settled in.

By then, mice and cats had beat him to it, nesting into the corners of the Nora Store and in its dilapidated kitchen. For the next 13 years, Pedersen tidied it and warmed it, and this would become his home.

A hobby becomes so much more

Hosting sing-a-longs every holiday was never his intent.

In 1986, he bought a few acres to move out of the Nora Store and into the home next door. (Someone had to keep up those population numbers.) And he began collecting parts of an old pipe organ stored at the University of South Dakota’s National Music Museum in Vermillion.

“Oh, music has always been just a hobby,” says Pedersen, who once took piano lessons “from an old neighbor lady” while living in Los Angeles before he moved back to South Dakota, and plays music and sings at church.

By the fall of 1989, he and a few buddies started piecing the organ back together enough that “the Lord’s plan” made itself clear.

This hobby would become a life. He took out an ad in the local newspaper and invited people to come sing Christmas carols.

On a recent blustery morning, Pedersen sat at the organ, remembering the first time he played it. “I was awestruck to sit in front of such a thing," he says. “I thought, ‘Oh, what a blessing!’ I didn’t deserve it, but I had to hear what it sounded like, so this is what I heard.”

Then he turned his back from the crowd and into the black-and-white haven of his keys, he played the first song he had ever played on it:

Jesus loves me, this I know,for the Bible tells me so.Little ones to him belong;they are weak, but he is strong.

There are about 20 guests singing along and calling out their favorite classics to play next. They had arrived in a caravan for a private sing-a-long, from the Trinity Lutheran Church in Tea about 40 minutes away.

“You can tell we’re Lutheran because no one is sitting in the front row,” says Dick Gors, president of their 55-and-older church group that gathers monthly and attends the Nora Store Christmas as its December activity each year.

The store doesn't sell anything, it simply is a place to gather once a year, with some parents who came as children now here with their own children.

“We’ve been coming here for five years now,” says Linda Dannen, of Tea, as she and her husband, Leo, sat in the back row and shared a hymnal. “Mike is a joy, and he makes it a good day.”

Together, they tapped their feet while Pedersen commanded his organ and they sang, “Away in a Manger,” “Silent Night” and “Oh Come, All Ye Faithful.”

Pedersen took off his shoes around song three to better feel the music and encouraged everyone to ring the bells he placed in each row.

Guests also sing solos, play their own instruments and even bring cookies for the crowd. Like any place of worship, visitors found an infectious feeling of hope in the room.

'Is this my last hurrah?'

This year, Pedersen wondered if this might be his finale: “I was having a bad hip and a bad attitude."

But then attention turned to Nora. A South Dakota magazine featured the Nora Store, and CBS News featured him earlier this week.

Pedersen would stay one more year, and now Nora might need more parking.

Pedersen walks gingerly with a cane, and takes a break from the organ and wonders aloud if it’s soon time to, “play music in heaven?”

“Nora has been my life ministry, but is this my last hurrah?” he says after the show. “Me and fame? I don’t need any of that. I’m just trying to be a servant and bless you this Christmas.”

Magic for your Christmas

There is a magic in little Nora, in that century-old country store on the corner transformed into a nostalgic wonderland. But it’s not the trinkets on the wall, a guestbook the size of an encyclopedia, the baby Christmas tree twinkling in the corner or the faux Poinsettia adorning his organ.

“Oh, there’s no place like Nora for the holidays,” Pedersen improvises as he sings, “for the holidays you can’t beat home sweet home!”

Visitors finish with “We Wish You a Merry Christmas,” before Pedersen gives hugs and kindly bid everyone farewell and a happy holiday.

To put a bow on the magic of the hour, Pedersen escorts us to the door and hangs his arm out to wave, the way Father Christmas departs in his sleigh, and do you know what?

It started to snow.

This article originally appeared on Sioux Falls Argus Leader: Nora Store Christmas in South Dakota