This past weekend was my last in Copenhagen, and my host family and I celebrating by having an early, traditional, Danish Christmas: jul. For dinner my host family invited friends and family, and we enjoyed roast pork, red cabbage salad, sugar potatoes, regular potatoes, and brown sauce. And my cranberry sauce!
We decorated the tree with candles, real ones!, and lit them after dinner. Everyone held hands and "danced" around the Christmas tree while singing Danish Jul songs. Some of us sang anyway...I either mumbled the Danish lyrics (which I could look at in a songbook) if I knew the melody, or just concentrated on walking around the tree without hitting it and lighting the house on fire. I was proud that I knew the final song "Nu det jul igen" -"Now it is Christmas again", at least somewhat. For this song, we all put down the songbooks and RAN around the Christmas tree. Everytime a new chorus started, we quickly switched directions, much to my surprise.
After all our dancing, we needed dessert. Nina had made the traditional Ris a la mande. It's a sort of cold rice pudding, with lots of crushed almonds and whipped cream in it, cherry sauce on top, plus one whole almond. The person that gets the almond has to conceal it somehow until everyone is done eating. Nina won the "almond gift" by getting the almond in a hiding in her port wine until Stine noticed.
After eating, around 11:00pm or so, we played a gift swap game. It's a little like our "Yankee Swap" but with dice. A 6 gets you a present, and after the presents are distributed a 6 or 1 redistributes the gifts. It was a great time, with a lot of presents, a lot rivalries and some bribing.
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