I travelled to Holbæk for my traditional and culturual Danish Christmas experience!

 

Peter's mum invited me to their family dinner on Christmas Eve.  We had a light lunch of bread with different choice of toppings like herring, herring in curry sauce etc.  I went to church (yes mum i went to church!!) in an old Danish church complete with one of those fancy pulpits.  Apparanlty all churches in Denmark face east.  The tower is always on the western side and the alter faces east.  Or something like that.

 

For dinner we had an entree of Salmon on toasted bread with a cream sauce.  For main course we had two roasted ducks, ham with crispy skin, red cabbage, potatoes, bread and some other stuff that I can't seem to remember.  There were 10 people at the dinner.  Which is quite a small number compared to what I'm used to since i'm one of 23-25 cousins on both sides of the family!

 

Because we were sooo full we held off dessert till after dancing around the tree and opening presents.  Thats right!! In Danish culture, we held hands and danced/walked around the tree singing Christmas carols.  It was quite funny since not all of us can sing and I can't sing in Danish!  There are pictures of this which will be posted up!  The Christmas Tree!!! wow it was a real tree decorated with really nice ornaments and .. real candles!!  So they don't use plastic trees and there is a chance of burning the tree, but it looked great!! Not sure how they turned out on the camera.

 

Under the tree were a huge number of presents where we went two at a time giving presents.  So someone would pick a present and give it to ther person who's name is on it.  That person would open the present, thank the person that gave it and then randomly pick another present to give to someone else.  And so it goes.  It was pretty similar to what i'm used to except one of my uncles dresses up as santa and distributes the presents.  And in my family, you can't open the presents till eveyone has gotten theirs.  So its a huge unwrapping at the same time, quite exciting!!  So i both gave presents to the family members that I had met previously and got some in return

 

Then it time for another tradition... well more of a game.  Not sure if I mentioned this in my Christmas Lunch in Århus but in this game there is a pile of random presents.  You roll the dice and if you get 6, you pick one.  The dice keeps going around the cirlce until all presents have been chosen.  So some people can end up with 3 or 1 or 0 presents.  Then the games begin.  Under an unknown time limit, you roll the dice again and if you get 6... you steal a present from someone else!!!  So everyone rushes through rolling the dice to try to steal the bigger presents before the time is up.  Then when the timer goes off, you open your present (I ended up with one) to find ..... door stoppers!!! Not just one.. but THREE DOOR STOPPERS!!! hahahahaha Which is quite freaky since I have exactly three doors in my room.  One to the hallway, one to the lounge room and one directly to Christine's (roommate) room .

 

So that game is something I will definately try to bring back!  Then we did the whole almond hidden in the rice pudding thing which I have talked about before.

 

Christmas day we woke up to a full english brunch.  Then went for a walk to the "Mountain of Holbæk" which is around 150m high.  The tallest point in Denmark is around 176m... so as you can tell Denmark is quite flat!  It was great since I got to see some country side and the view was quite spectacular, despite its low height! hehehehe.

 

I spent the rest of the weekend infront of the TV watching WPT  and movies.  So it was great to relax and just chillout before heading back to work on Tuesday.  So that was Christmas in Holbæk... thanks heaps to Peter and his family for adopting me termporairly and make sure that I wasn't alone on Christmas.. but more than that, thanks for letting me experience a Danish Christmas!!