The Year of Living Danishly (32 page)

‘Look, dog: an event!' I click on the starred day, eager with anticipation, only to find that the only fixture occurring over the next seven days in Jutland is my own choir's Christmas concert. Something I'm scheduled to be at anyway. Singing songs in a language I still don't understand and attempting to channel my inner gospel diva despite being both sober and, more crucially, British. ‘Excellent, dog: we have
one
afternoon's entertainment.' The dog growls. ‘And yes, I use “entertainment” in the loosest sense of the word.' This just leaves six days to fill. Our longest staying visitors to date were here for four days back in the summer, when Sticksville-on-Sea was ‘open', and we still struggled to entertain them after day three.

‘Don't Danes mind having nothing to do for a whole week and just hanging out with their family?' I ask Helena C between songs at our final choir rehearsal before Christmas. She admits to me in hushed tones that yes, her own relatives can get a bit much, but says that most Danes love it.

‘They ran this survey in 1998 and it showed that spending time with the family over Christmas was important to 78 per cent of Danes,' she tells me, as though this proves it. I point out that there weren't smartphones, or iPads, or
Netflix
back in 1998. ‘Hanging out with the family or watching
Friends
on terrestrial TV was about all there was
to
do back in those days…'

‘This is true,' she concedes. ‘Maybe that's why they haven't run a survey since. Oh well, good luck!'

Jeez, why does everyone keep wishing me luck?

‘Thanks,' I tell her. ‘It's beginning to sound like I might need it…'

The choir concert passes off without a hitch. I sing with the Danish lyrics written out phonetically and Sellotaped to a soprano in front of me. At the end I'm congratulated on my Danish by the choir mistress (‘not bad,
for a foreigner
') and my in-laws, unaware of the scribbled notes strapped to the back of my choral colleague.

‘Thanks,' I nod, graciously. Helena C tries not to smirk and promises to keep my secret safe ‘for now'.

Afterwards, we all share
æbleskiver
, a traditional spherical pancake of pure deliciousness served with jam and icing sugar. There is a lot of hugging and wishing each other ‘
God Jul
!' – happy Christmas – before we all go our separate ways. Me, waddling back to the car I now barely fit into (the driving seat being so far back to accommodate my bump that my feet only just reach the pedals) and heading home to stare into the abyss of six days of nothingness.

We've resolved to do Christmas as Danishly as possible and so I've taken counsel from all the Danes I know to compile a foolproof recipe plan for the big day. On the menu: duck with prunes, caramelised potatoes, boiled potatoes (because Danes can never have enough potatoes in any given mealtime) and red cabbage followed by
risalamande
. Helena C has offered to be on call at the end of the phone should any calamities arise, and so it begins. Danes celebrate with a traditional roast dinner on Christmas Eve, so my 24th December goes something like this:

7am: Wake up, try to let dog out quietly to avoid waking guests. Fail, so make them tea.

9am: Start peeling things. Stare at the duck currently taking up most of fridge. Try to dissuade dog from barking at duck by distracting with bone. Do something unspeakable with giblets. Feel a bit queasy.

11am: Make rice pudding to allow time for it to set and chill in fridge. Try to get over idea of a dessert that has same consistency as sick and forget about traumatic experiences with school lunches and the word ‘coagulate'. Whip cream with handheld blender. Send cream up walls, down front, and over dog. Put dog outside to clean off in the snow. Melt more sugar for cherry sauce. Blanch almonds and chop up, then stir in to lumpy goo with more sugar and more cream.

1pm: Eat a light lunch of pickled herring on rye bread. House now smells of cream, melted sugar, fish and flatulence.

2pm: Finish off a feature for UK newspaper where Christmas Eve is still a legitimate working day. Check email and find one from a PR inviting me to a ‘One-day Festive Resilience Workshop' and another entitled ‘Coping Techniques for Christmas Stress'. Wonder how much they know…

4.30pm: Boil potatoes. Put duck in oven. Battle with six pans and a temperamental oven crammed with baking trays while perspiring in just a stretched T-shirt and shorts now, despite snow outside. Decide Danish homes may be too well insulated.

5pm: Go to mass at local church to experience ‘traditional' Christmas service. Only it's long, all in Danish, and I have a duck in the oven. Realise haven't thought this one through. Keep eye on watch as elderly folk around me in furs begin nodding off and snoring gently. Small child in front row turns around, rolls eyes, and mimes hanging himself to express boredom. And he can understand what the priest's banging on about…

7pm: Waddle home. Attempt to extract bird's fat. Make brown sauce from cream, fat and cornflour. Wonder if have ever used as much cream, butter and sugar before. Decide have not. Melt yet more sugar in frying pan, add more butter, make face as drop in half of potatoes and roll them around until resemble miniature toffee apples.

8pm: Unscrew lid of supermarket-bought red cabbage (in Danish: ‘
rød kål
', which sounds amusingly like ‘roadkill'), decant into rustic-looking dish and bury jar in bin. Mush up cabbage to pass off as homemade. Get all dishes on table, make Lego Man carve, collapse. Forget Christmas crackers, retrieve from behind sofa then wish hadn't bothered. These fail to go ‘bang' but include such hilarious Danish jokes as: ‘If you need to do something, do it right as the hassle is the same,' and, ‘He who understands how to listen often sits and thinks about something else'. Oh, how we laugh!

9pm: ‘Singing and dancing' commences. No one is hurt, but the dog gets drenched.

Let me explain. My Danish festive advisory committee assured me that to do things properly, we must also decorate our bushy Danish fir tree with the colours of the Danish flag – red and white – as well as the obligatory ‘
nature
', fairy lights and
real candles
.

‘Then, after Christmas dinner,' said Helena C, ‘you all dance round the tree, singing.'

‘
Whoa
there,' I stop her. ‘
Real
candles? In a
dried-out
tree? In
wood-heavy
, Scandi homes?'

‘Yes.'

‘Do you do that when there are children about?'

‘Especially then. The kids love it!'

‘Excited children and naked flames? What could go wrong?'

‘Yeah, I see what you mean,' says Helena C. ‘I thought everyone did this until we had an Australian over for Christmas one year and he pointed out the fire hazard.'

‘Quite.'

‘But we make sure we're safe.'

‘How?'

‘Well,' she says, ‘we always have a big bucket of water to throw over the tree in case anything happens.' Good grief.

‘And you have fairy lights as well as candles? Don't you trip over the cord?'

She looks at me as though I'm a mal-coordinated imbecile. ‘We just … step over it…'

‘OK, but how do you get round the tree?' I explain that we normally have ours in a corner. ‘That way, you only have to decorate one side of it.'

Helena C gives me a judgey face: ‘We tend to decorate
all the way
around and then we just pull the tree out into the middle of the room on a mat for the singing and dancing.'

‘Right then.'
I can do this
, I think,
how hard can it be?
‘And what do you normally sing?' I ask.

‘Well, there are a few Danish songs we all know that I can give you the words to,' she goes on, ‘then my uncle always sings the first two lines of “Winter Wonderland”.'

‘Only the first two?'

‘Yes. He doesn't know the rest.'

‘Oh.'

‘He
could
learn them. We tell him to every year. But so far, nothing.' She shakes her head as though he is a huge disappointment as singing uncles go. ‘So anyway, you and your family should just sing whatever you like, then hold hands and dance around the tree. Easy!'

Only it doesn't quite turn out this way. Our vast, bushy fir looks lovely lit up by fairy lights and real candles. But there are only four of us and so reaching our arms out to hold hands around the tree proves a struggle. Flames flicker precariously close to the blinds, the sofa and Lego Man's acrylic Christmas jumper, and twice our guests trip over the cord of the fairy lights. It turns out that none of us are much cop at remembering any festive songs in their entirety and after trip-up number three, we collapse on the sofa, laughing hysterically in a release of cooped-up festive stress. At this uncharacteristic whooping, the dog makes a break for it from his sentry post at the front door to see what all the commotion is about. In slow motion he moves from the tree, to me, then to Lego Man, checking that all is well, before spotting the ominous black bucket on hand in case of fire.
This
, he assesses,
is new. This
, he suspects,
could be dangerous
. With an energetic leap, he pounces on the alien object, placing his front paws on its side to get a better look inside … and tips its contents all over himself, the wooden floor and the special ‘tree mat' purchased for the occasion. My first Danish Christmas celebrations end with a mop in hand.

And then … calm descends. The shops are all closed as we were warned they would be, and the roads empty. Danes, it turns out, really do stay at home with their families. For a
week
. So we do the same. We read books, laze around, drink cups of tea and watch the snow fall outside from the warmth of the sofa. And then, when it finally settles, we go for a walk. And all is peaceful and white. It is, I have to admit, magical.

The enforced retreat means that we talk, properly, about everything from favourite films to foreign policy. I learn that my father-in-law can, if left to his own devices, get through a pot of honey
every two days
and once built his own wooden cage then sat in it for twelve hours in Newcastle's MetroCentre to protest against political prisoners for Amnesty International. I find out that my mother-in-law once created her own ice rink by flooding a car park during a particularly severe frost one year. I get to know my in-laws far better over these seven (
seven!
) days than I have during the years that Lego Man and I have been together. It's like bonding bootcamp. No wonder Danish families are so close – they don't have much choice come Christmas.

It's gone OK. Better than I had feared. But I'm happy to have the house back to ourselves at the end of the week. Since there's still nothing going on in the environs of Sticksville, we do some nesting. I wash everything in sight and Lego Man demonstrates his full array of Viking-esque powers by assembling an Ikea cot single-handedly. We hang a print of the Danish alphabet, complete with the extra three letters and a few suspect squiggles, in our spare room. My desk gets shipped out into the hallway and all manner of baby paraphernalia is manoeuvered in.

On 31 December, the country finally wakes from its snowy slumber. Denmark's New Year's Eve rituals begin at 6pm with the monarch's speech – something that started in 1942 during the German occupation when the king called for national unity. We're celebrating the passing of the last year and welcoming the one to come at The Viking's house, and I've offered to help him cook. He fills me in on a few Danish customs while I poke uncertainly at a cauldron of green mush that he assures me is ‘traditional stewed kale'. This, he tells me, is served with potatoes (natch) and cured saddle of pork for New Year's Eve – yes, Danes are firmly back in the pork saddle after a brief dabble with duck over Christmas.

We chat and occasionally stir things, or jiggle a roasting tin, with the Queen's speech in the background. I tell him that I'm surprised by how fond Danes seem to be of their monarch and The Viking reveals that he's a big fan, too.

‘Margrethe gets these crazy high approval ratings despite the fact that most people here probably wouldn't describe themselves as monarchists,' he tells me. In fact, the Danish monarchy is the most popular in Europe and a poll published in the Danish newspaper
Politiken
revealed that 77 per cent of Danes are happy with their queen.

‘We don't think royals
in general
are great,' The Viking clarifies, ‘we just like our lot.' I ask him why he thinks this is and he says: ‘It's such a small country that most people will have seen her in the flesh or even met her at some point. And she's just a nice, normal woman. She stinks, but she's lovely.'

‘Sorry?'

‘—Of cigarettes, I mean. She's a massive chain smoker – but we don't tend to mind. It just makes her seem flawed, like one of us.' And there you have it. Liz: next time you feel an
annus horribilis
looming, try lighting up.

In this year's speech, as far as I can make out, Margrethe tells everyone to keep being tolerant but to try and be a bit nicer to each other.

‘Is that right?' I ask The Viking, unsure of my shoddy translating skills and not as fast on the Google Translate app as I used to be with my nine-month-pregnant fat fingers.

‘You've pretty much got it,' The Viking tells me. ‘
Margrethe
,' I'm enjoying how he insists on referring to her by her Christian name as if she's an old family friend, ‘
Margrethe
generally tells us that we're doing OK, but that we could all try a bit harder.'

After this, pundits discuss any hidden meanings in what she's said for the following 50 minutes before concluding that her message is indeed: ‘keep being nice'. It's all very civilised. What's less couth, I learn, are the other Danish New Year's Eve traditions.