Uffda! It’s cold outside, which makes it the perfect time to remember Minnesota symbols like Ole, Lena and Sven.

They’re Minnesota Nice at its finest, a humor-based byproduct of the Norwegian and Swedish immigrant experience. Some of our local communities celebrate it at least once a year. Granite Falls will wish visitors Velkommen (welcome) starting today at its annual Ole and Lena Days winter carnival. Hendricks, Canby and other communities also have well-recognized traditions that range from Sons of Norway chapters to bake sales with plenty of ethnic dessert treats.

There are plenty of serious ways for those with Scandinavian ancestry as well as others to recognize the contributions of those who eventually followed in the footsteps of Norse explorers. With Ole, his wife, and his best friend; it’s all strictly just for fun.

I have a modest amount of Swedish ancestry through great-Grandma Anna on my mom’s side of the family. It’s mixed with shares of Polish, German, English, Belgian and Dutch.

The Swedish part must be enough for me to at least in some ways identify with the spirit of Ole-related storytelling. A wide assortment of jokes are available online, some of them very family-oriented and others that would easily merit a PG-rating.

The first one I spotted is suitable for family entertainment. Ole and Sven are at a funeral when Ole realizes he can’t remember the name of the dearly departed. He asks Sven who the funeral is for. Sven replies that he’s not sure, but he thinks it’s for the guy in the box.

That’s par for the course when it comes to how they’re comedy characters who aren’t afraid to be themselves or to say what’s on their minds.

The same type of characterization consistently comes across in the works of Minnesota humorists such as Howard Mohr of Cottonwood and Prairie Home Companion radio star Garrison Keillor. They write about how it’s OK to be humble, that it’s often a better approach than going out of one’s way to appear sophistocated. There’s definitely a certain amount of real sophistication behind that mindset.

Whenever something comes along that Ole, Lena, Sven or any similar comic character doesn’t like, a typical way of expressing themselves is to say “I’m not real happy about it.” The very most that should be said is that they’re “a little dissatisfied.”

If I had to take all of their qualities and sum them up with just one word, the best word I can think of is “affable.” It’s definitely not the same as bubbly or happy-go-lucky. It gives the impression of being passive, but does not involve always being entirely non-committal.

Affable means being at ease with others, being a polite human being but in the end still being yourself.

To appreciate characters derived from ethnic traditions who are so affable that at first glance they might appear to fall within stereotypes, it’s necessary to be able to approach a joke with the idea that it’s strictly a joke rather than a putdown.

The clearest real-life example that I’ve seen through journalism came across as part of a phone interview in 1999 with a friend of well-remembered Marshall photographer Julius Locy. A counterpart from Montevideo named John Peterson told me how he became lifelong friends with Locy through their businesses, and included a detail about how they jokingly referred to each other as a “crazy Belgian” and a “crazy Norwegian.”

That’s a testimony to why America is a great place. It shows that it’s historically been possible for someone to cross the Atlantic Ocean or any other physical or cultural barrier without having to totally renounce the heritage from which he or she came.

We can learn a lot from the personas of Ole, Lena and Sven. It’s good to be able to enjoy them along with other ethnic traditions in our rural prairie region; traditions that include items such as lefse, kielbasa, aebleskivers, nissemands, Belgian cookie irons, and rolle bolle to name just a few.

If any of those sound foreign, there are yearly opportunities to sample them at celebrations organized by local communities. Whenever people try them for the first time, they usually like them. To paraphrase from one of my favorite movies, “Forrest Gump,” from 1995 starring Tom Hanks in the title role, an introduction usually means that “now we aren’t strangers any more.”

So don’t be afraid to venture out in the depths of a typical Minnesota winter. Any opportunity to experience any set of genuine ethnic traditions is well worth it.