Sankt Hans Aften

Molli has elected to take a nap at an awkward time, delaying our trip to Tivoli for an indeterminate period. And since, like I said yesterday, I anticipate even more Mollipix than usual this weekend, I might as well get caught up by posting yesterday’s right now.

We begin with the playground at Mormor’s. Molli loves the baby swing there, and we shot the equivalent of about two rolls of “old-fashioned” film on her swinging and squealing, as well as a cumulative minute or two of video.

The next picture is just a sweet close-up in which the bottom two teeth are as glaringly obvious as they are in real life. Her vampire teeth are also unmistakable now (though not in this picture), giving her a very weird look, but help is on the way—as I think I’ve mentioned, her front right tooth has finally broken the gum and should help fill in that weird gap within a week or two.

We had a lovely dinner on that familiar terrace. Mormor treated Molli to some ice-cream and strawberries for dessert.

“It’s her first ice-cream!” I cried with delight, snapping a dozen photos.

“Er… not really her first,” Mormor acknowledged sheepishly. Well, okay, it was the first ice-cream her parents had seen her eat. She seemed to like it.

(Yes, that was understatement.)

At about 9:15 we began heading to the Garden for the ritual burning of the witch. We’d expected Molli to fall asleep in her stroller, but she was wide awake. More than wide-awake: she was absolutely manic. She seemed to be sensing, and to be feeding off, the slightly crazy atmosphere of the thousands of Frederiksbergers flocking toward the bonfire.

She actually seemed impatient, as though she knew something interesting was about to happen but had no idea what.

Where’d she get an idea like that?

In the picture above, which looks more like Woodstock than Frederiksberg Garden, you can see the as-yet unlit bonfire. It’s the thing that looks like a Christmas tree in the very center of the photograph.

The crowd was too much for us with Molli and her oversized Sports Utility Pram, so we retired to a quieter corner. This was about as quiet a spot of the park as could be found last night:

The Mayor of Frederiksberg came out and gave a speech. Ironically enough, I heard him saying a lot of the things I’d said during my oral exam! He talked about globalization, the painful but necessary loss of low-wage jobs, the importance of education, the need to better assimilate immigrants, and so on. He also used one phrase I’ve heard so often in political speeches that I had to ask if it were a Constitutional requirement of political discourse: “Vi er et lille land, men…” (“We are a little country, but…”).

You could tell we were in Denmark because this blowhard’s stultifyingly political message was not booed despite the crowd’s impatience to see the witch set ablaze. Everyone waited politely and there was polite applause when he finished. (Molli applauded, too, but she claps when she hears applause on television so it probably didn’t signify her endorsement of the mayor’s ideas.)

At last the fire was ignited just a little before ten o’clock.

Molli got to see her first burning of a witch!

The fire lasted all of ten minutes (the witch about thirty seconds), then we just kind of hung around and sipped wine while we let the hurry-hurry-gotta-beat-the-crowd type people throng all the exits. Strangely, the orchestra then played an instrumental version of Bohemian Rhapsody. I got some of it on video because I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I thought they’d maybe snuck it in as a joke. But then they played five or six Abba hits in a row (Dancing Queen, Mama Mia, and Fernando among them), so I guess they’d decided to end the night on a pop note.

I got this shot of three generations of Kammer girls while we waited.

It was about half past ten as we made our way out of the park. Boats were still paddling around the canals, swans were still preening themselves in the ponds, and Molli was still wide awake.

Why wouldn’t she be? It was creeping towards eleven o’clock at night and the sky looked like this:

So Lucy didn’t pull the ball away from us after all. Keep the faith, Charlie Brown!