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For many Norwegian-American families, the biggest Christmas treat isn't foil-wrapped chocolate or sugar-dusted cookies. It's lefse, a simple flatbread.

Lefse are sort of like soft tortillas, made mostly out of mashed potatoes (with a little fat and flour mixed in to form a tender dough). They're usually spread with butter and sugar, or rolled up with a bit of lingonberry jam. And families that make them make them by the dozens.

"It's probably one of the first foods I fell in love with," says Megan Walhood, who lives in Portland Ore., and has family roots in Norway. "The rest of the year, I would just think about, when are we going to have lefse again?"

The Salt

Why We Hold Tight To Our Family's Holiday Food Traditions

Walhood loves the unique toasty potato flavor. And, she says, "there's something so comforting about soft, starchy things."

For the Walhood family, that comfort goes way back.

Megan's dad, Dale Walhood, grew up in North Dakota, with a strong sense of his Norwegian heritage — and lefse. "On my father's side of the family, lefse arrived [with the family to the U.S.] in 1825, for the opening of the Erie Canal."

Many of the surrounding families in their rural part of North Dakota had similar roots. And it showed in the lefse. "Weddings and funerals and christenings. Anything that smacked of a lot of Norwegians there — yeah, there'd be stacks of it," Walhood remembers.

These days, lefse in America is pretty much reserved for Christmas (and, in some families, Thanksgiving). For the Walhoods, lefse-making is a true family project. Peggy Walhood, Megan's mother, has Swedish roots ("a mixed marriage," she laughs), but learned from her mother-in-law the art of wrapping up the still-warm lefse in towels to keep them soft and pliable.

As with many simple foods, much of it comes down to technique. The key to lefse, the Walhoods explain, is to keep things tender. That means chilling the mashed potatoes so that you only need a minimum of flour to form a dough, and rolling them nice and thin with a special grooved rolling pin.

"You want to roll it thin enough, and then also even," Megan Walhood explains. "You don't want to have a fat edge and a skinny edge, which are not the ideal. They're not approved by the 'Lefse Commission,' " she and her dad laugh.

There's even an art to shimmying a long flat stick — called a lefse stick — beneath the dough to transfer it to the griddle.

Then you brush off the extra flour, to keep it from either burning on the griddle or being absorbed and toughening the flatbread. It's a step that yields a nice finished product, but also a fair amount of floury mess. Dale Walhood jokes that cleanup was "about a six-hour vacuum job."

Once the lefse are finished, all warm and toasty and inviting, they're spread with butter and sugar. And devoured.

Carrying on the lefse tradition is especially poignant this year, the family says. Dale Walhood was diagnosed with cancer in the spring. They didn't think they'd get this Christmas together.

The Walhood lefse legacy extends far beyond this particular floury table. A few years back, Megan and her husband Jeremy opened a business and food truck in Portland, Ore., called Viking Soul Food. The entire menu is based around Dale's lefse.

"I'm incredibly proud of her," Dale says, nearly overcome. "Her sensitivity, and her dedication to quality. And I'm one of seven children, so they all look to her for their lefse."

Megan and Jeremy estimate that Viking Soul Food will turn about 250 pounds of potatoes into lefse this week — enough make memories on dozens of Christmas tables.

food traditions

Norway

I've always had a good time in Cuba. The people are friendly and funny, the rum is smooth, the music intoxicating and the beaches wide, white and soft.

But you're accompanied everywhere by government minders. They call them responsables. Any Cuban you interview knows your microphone might as well run straight to their government.

If you want to talk to someone with a different view, you have to slip out of your hotel in the middle of the night without your minder — though dissidents say other security people follow you.

Each trip I've made as a reporter has revealed a little more of what kind of society Cubans live in. It's a warm, sunny place, filled with industrious and accomplished people who laugh loudly in public but mutter or whisper under their breath about the government. And the government is everywhere.

In Cuba, the government is the news and the economy. It is the only voice in every broadcast or book. Every neighborhood has a local "Committee for the Defense of the Revolution," on watch for what they call "counter-revolutionary activities."

You still sometimes make a human connection with your responsable, and each trip, I've left with a light suitcase. Responsables beg — that is not too strong a word — for you to leave them your blue jeans, razor blades, toothpaste, or The Economist magazine, which they cannot get and often try to sell.

Government press people say, each trip, "Return as a tourist. Bring your family," and I've been tempted. Havana is beautiful, caught in a kind of pastel time capsule of a 1940's sea-breeze skyline and 1950's Chevies nosing noisily up the street. Havana would be something to see before new Hyatts, Starbucks, or Chase Bank buildings make it look like many other modern cities.

But tourists inhabit a separate Havana. They can spend dollars, eat lobster, and drink wine in beachside restaurants in which Cubans are not permitted. They can watch news from around the world and travel the Internet as Cubans can't.

And it is startling and sad to see legions of young women lined up behind tourist hotels, hoping, as Yoani Sanchez, the Cuban blogger, has written, to "snag ... a tourist to take them to a hotel and offer them, the next morning, a breakfast that comes with milk."

The largest hotel company in Latin America is the Grupode Tirismo Gaviota. It is owned by the Cuban military. So while I've been glad to go to Cuba as a reporter, I can't bring myself to return as a tourist.

Maybe now, more Americans will get the chance to see Cuba. And I hope they get to know what they're really seeing.

Latin America

tourism

Cuba

Pennsylvania's fracking boom has led to record-breaking natural gas production, but its neighbor, New York, announced Wednesday it was banning the practice. Industry and environmental groups say New York's decision could be good for Pennsylvania.

New York's ban comes six years after the state placed a temporary moratorium on fracking to study the gas drilling technique. Now, officials question fracking's economic benefits and cite environmental risks.

"There are many red flags because scientific issues have not yet been comprehensively studied through rigorous scientific research at this time," says Howard Zucker, New York's acting health commissioner.

George Stark, a spokesman for Houston-based Cabot Oil and Gas, says New Yorkers who fear the process just don't understand it. The company operates many of the most productive wells in Pennsylvania.

"Our industry — this entire episode — is saving many farms. So the farmers that I've been in contact with endorse and embrace hydraulic fracturing," Stark says.

Pennsylvania is now dotted with more than 7,000 active wells.

i i

A drilling rig in Butler County, Pa., in 2013. Pennsylvania is now dotted with more than 7,000 active wells. Jason Cohn/MCT/Landov hide caption

itoggle caption Jason Cohn/MCT/Landov

A drilling rig in Butler County, Pa., in 2013. Pennsylvania is now dotted with more than 7,000 active wells.

Jason Cohn/MCT/Landov

Christopher Robart, an analyst with IHS Energy, says New York's ban will have little to no impact on drillers already at work in nearby states.

"They can do things much more economically and efficiently in those parts where there already is money and already are investments in the ground than in New York, for instance, where they'd have to start from scratch," he says.

Industry groups say they've felt like New York has had an "unwelcome" mat out for years.

To Stephanie Catarino Wissman, who heads Pennsylvania's division of the American Petroleum Institute, New York's loss is Pennsylvania's gain.

"I mean, I would say to New Yorkers, 'Come to Pennsylvania and take advantage of these jobs that are available with this well-paying industry,' " she says.

Meanwhile, environmental groups in Pennsylvania cheered the decision.

"It's a great day for the people in the shale fields whose experience has been repeatedly denied by the industry," says Joanne Kilgour, who heads Sierra Club's Pennsylvania chapter.

Those experiences include things like tainted water supplies, unhealthy air emissions and the industrialization of rural landscapes.

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Long After Fracking Stops, The Noise Lives On

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Despite New York's decision, both sides of the drilling debate are worried about what's next for Pennsylvania. The state's newly elected Democratic governor, Tom Wolf, made his central campaign pledge about levying a new tax on the gas industry.

But Kilgour and other environmentalists worry that could make the state even more reliant on fracking.

"What we want to make sure that we don't do is continue to rely on these boom-bust, single-source economies that are inherent to the extraction of fossil fuels," Kilgour says.

The industry has lobbied heavily against the tax, calling it a job killer.

Wolf opposes a ban on fracking but wants to strengthen regulations. And he plans to create a new registry for public health complaints. "I think this could be a really great thing for Pennsylvania's economy. It could create great jobs," Wolf says. "So I want to have my cake and eat it, too. I don't want to do what New York did."

When he takes office next month, Wolf will face a $2 billion budget shortfall. He's counting on Pennsylvania's gas to help solve the state's fiscal woes.

Among the changes to U.S. restrictions on Cuba President Obama announced Wednesday was a relaxation of the rules barring U.S. banks from doing business there.

Americans traveling in Cuba will now be able to use their credit cards and ATM cards, but many U.S. banks see the new rules as something of a legal minefield.

Even before Wednesday's announcement, the trade embargo with Cuba wasn't absolute. The government allowed U.S. citizens to sell certain kinds of agricultural and medical products to Cuba under special license, but many companies were reluctant to do so.

The government has long barred U.S. banks from doing business in Cuba, meaning anyone hoping to sell products there had to find an intermediary bank in Cuba to process the trade. It's a complicated process, and Julia Sweig of the Council on Foreign Relations says a lot of banks decided it wasn't worth the trouble.

"Cuba has to tie itself in knots in order to find financial or business institutions that are willing to pay the additional markup to do business with it," she says.

The new rules will allow U.S. banks to form direct relationships with banks in Cuba. They will also make the process of paying for goods traded with the country a lot easier.

"So these changes are potentially seismic in that they would make a lot simpler, a lot more direct and a lot cheaper, all of these financial transactions," says Ted Henken, a professor at Baruch College and author of Entrepreneurial Cuba: The Changing Policy Landscape.

And yet, many banks are looking at these changes with caution.

The Two-Way

New Era For Cuba? Voices From Miami And Havana

The Two-Way

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The U.S. has trade embargos against several countries including Iran and North Korea, and in recent years the U.S. government has pursued banks that violate them aggressively. In July, the French bank BNP Paribas agreed to pay a $9 billion fine for processing transactions for clients in several embargoed countries including Cuba.

The Two-Way

Polls Show Cuban-American Views On U.S.-Cuba Relations Are Nuanced

"In general, banks have been shaken very deeply by recent enforcement actions and are disinclined to dip their feet into what they see as shark-infested waters," says Clif Burns, an attorney who specializes in sanctions.

Right now many U.S. banks are waiting to see the text of the new regulations, says David Schwartz, president and CEO of the Florida International Bankers Association.

"Banks are going to analyze very closely the regulations that do come out to determine how much leeway that does give them, how does that reduce the risk of doing that business?" he says.

But Schwartz also acknowledges that the relaxation of the Cuban embargo is an opportunity for banks, even if they're cautious about taking advantage of it.

banking

Cuba