It’s been a little over a month since the last post. We’re heading into the last week of what’s been a cold and even snowy January, and the festivities of December already feel a long time ago.
We’re still in a pretty strict lockdown: schools are all digital, there are no extra-curricular activities for the kids or for adults, and the only stores that are open are those providing necessities: those that sell food, drinks, gas, and other essentials. Restaurants are only allowed to provide take-out.
Trine’s still going to work every day, but she and her colleagues are now encouraged to do as much of their administrative work as possible from home. I’m still working exclusively from home, and my gig work has resumed as well.
We’re still hanging in there.
Before I pick things up where I left off in mid-December, though, I thought I’d drop in a couple of pictures from August 9, 1997. I scanned them in over the holidays for use in our “Christmas Bingo” game, so I might as well plop them in here as part of the permanent record.
These are from the innocuous little canoeing trip during which fate conspired to bring us together, up in some lakes along the Wisconsin-Illinois border:
(I don’t know why I’m in a life vest… probably because we’re still within eyeshot of the rental dock.)
But let’s get back to December. We’re starting on the 20th of that month, the Sunday before Trine’s and my last days of work going into the holidays. It was time at last to make our Christmas konfekt.
And look at that! It’s Molli’s boyfriend Kalle, and that’s his first appearance on these electric pages.
After making all the holiday treats it was time to decorate our tree, which was already shedding needles like Didi sheds fur.
Notice how the track lighting was set to red and green: it created a nice effect, so we’ll have to remember that next year.
It was also the last Advent Sunday of the season.
Later in the evening, Trine daubed all the confectionary delights with chocolate and she (and Maddie, I think) decorated them with sprinkles.
And here’s a shot showing off the red and green lighting effect on the tree:
Trine and I then worked the next three weekdays, and Thursday was Christmas Eve at last.
We all slept in as late as we could. As usual, the official “start” of Christmas Eve was watching the last episode of the Christmas Calendar show that had been consuming half an hour of every evening since the 1st: Julefeber!
Next came the traditional dinner: pork roast, duck, and the usual accompaniments.
(Hadn’t yet mentioned that Mormor, Jørgen, and Mette were with us, but that’s really a given at this point.)
Trine hadn’t liked the way I’d had my hair cut in November, but she decided that the way it looked on Christmas Eve was perfect: it had grown in just right. She therefore took a bunch of shots of me to have a record of How My Hair Should Always Look.
(I’m just happy to finally have Christmas pictures of myself that aren’t just whatever horrible selfie I might have snapped after my third glass of wine!)
And one for the permanent record:
The “M” I’m holding was on Molli’s door from all the way back when we lived on Holger Danskes Vej up until five or six years ago. She decorated it herself (at about age three): blue glue paint with silver glitter. Since then it had been sitting on one of our living room shelves, and I decided it had perhaps outlived its usefulness. I promised to take a picture of it to make it immortal, after which Molli consented to my throwing it into the trash.
Her bedroom door is still decorated with the clown letters we first affixed to her bedroom on Holger Danskes Vej back in 2006 or so: I don’t think those will be as easy to discard. (Maddie pried her own off a while back and I’m not even sure we know where they are any more.)
But back to Christmas dinner: here we are enjoying our risalamande and wondering who’s been lucky enough to get the almond.
(It was Trine.)
After a little dinner cleanup it was time for the annual Christmas tree portrait of the girls:
And then singing and dancing around the tree, Corona style:
No holding hands, masks on. Hopefully we never have to do that again.
And here, by the way, a special treat: I’ve just discovered that I can easily provide streaming videos now that I’m hosting the blog on my own website. So here’s some video of the singing around the tree. First the Danish version of Silent Night:
And then the big closer, Nu er det jul igen, which usually ends with a conga line snaking around the house…
Finally we get to the opening of gifts, which just isn’t the great excitement it was when the girls were little. Technically we do still have one six-year-old in the household, but she didn’t even understand that she was getting a gift.
(That’s Morfar, by the way, “sitting” in the chair at right: the blue glow is him on Whereby.)
And that’s it for Christmas.
It was a very nice Christmas and everyone was very merry. Poor Maddie, though: half her gifts had either gotten tangled up in the COVID-plus-Christmas mail delays or were “promissory notes” of a sort to begin with, so she had a lot of placeholder gifts. But she was a very good sport about it, and I think she’s been enjoying the slow roll of incoming gifts through January. (One of them is finally scheduled to arrive this week!)
At some point between Christmas and the New Year, the temperature dropped substantially.
But we barely noticed. We were all getting eight to twelve hours of sleep each night and doing our best to just enjoy the time off as lazily as possible.
I can’t think of a year that I’ve been more desperate to get out of than 2020, and I don’t think I’m alone in that. Even Her Majesty made that a theme of her speech:
“No! The year 2020 brought us what no one had imagined.”
But she ended the way she always ends her New Year’s Eve speeches:
(“GOD BLESS DENMARK”)
We stayed true to our own traditions and enjoyed a fondue dinner…
…and calls to far-away family, like this one with Morfar:
We also enjoyed build-your-own sundaes that were fiery but peaceful (and delicious):
And speaking of fiery, this year’s fireworks were a big disappointment: so, note to self, don’t buy this batteri again!
Yeah, “Crack Attack” is a pretty stupid name: it was supposed to be just a ton of those silver crackly fireworks: fifty or sixty rockets, each of them a big crackly shimmering shower of silver lighting up the sky.
And we did get most of that, except for the “lighting up the sky” part. The stupid rockets only went about fifteen or twenty feet in the air before detonating, so all they “lit up” was a small patch of Hybenvej (which it lit up all too well for our liking).
So, again: never buy “Crack Attack” again!
But I got a little ahead of myself there: at 23:40 it was time for “The 90 Birthday” sketch.
Same procedure as last year?
Same procedure as every year, James.
Indeed.
I’m not that into champagne. As I think I’ve mentioned on this blog before (probably every New Year’s Eve for the past fifteen years)), we never buy any: we just seem to accumulate it as gifts, and we just pluck out whichever bottle strikes our fancy on New Year’s Eve.
This year’s was without a doubt the best champagne I’ve ever tasted:
I don’t know who gave it to us, but we certainly owe them our thanks. I looked it up and it costs around 300 kroner per bottle (about fifty bucks), so although it’s more than I would ever spend on champagne, it’s not like it’s a wildly exorbitant label. But it tasted like it was. Man. Good stuff!
Finally, some of the fortunes we got in our Party Poppers:
The first one: “‘I’m doing what I can,’ said the ant, and he pissed in the lake.”
The second: “Life is a gift, and you have to unwrap it yourself.”
Not sure what those bode for our 2021, but I’m sure it’ll all make sense in hindsight. And who cares: just getting us out of 2020 is enough for 2021 to be a good year in my book.
Speaking of gifts to unwrap, in the first week of the New Year Trine received her biofeedback machine!
I realize that’s not a very good picture of a biofeedback machine. It could just as easily be a set of steak knives, a collection of office supplies, or a bundle of puppies: you’ll have to take my word for it. Trine now just has to learn how to use it, and she’ll then be one of just two companies in Denmark offering state-of-the-art biofeedback sessions (she’s planning to use it to help treat people with stress).
Back in New York in 2001, Trine and I booked a photo session at the Sears in Rego Park (I think) to get some silly pictures for our silly nieces (and other family members). We had one leftover, and it was in Molli’s room while she was still young enough to like having a picture of Mor and Daddy in her room; then it moved to Maddie’s room. While cleaning and rearranging over the holidays I found it lying upside down on a shelf in the guest room. So it gets dropped here for the permanent record, then packed away in a box…
On January 6 we had the first real snowstorm we’ve had in several years. It was only a couple of inches, but it was a real snow and it rocked Maddie’s world.
Thanks to the cold snap we were in, it stayed with us for several days. Then we had a day of warmth and rain that rinsed most of it away, followed by another period of low temperatures and a few more dustings of snow. Then it warmed up again just enough to rain, and although it’s been very cold the past week or so, we haven’t had any precipitation at all. (I’m not complaining.)
We subscribed to Disney+ the day that Soul was released, just so we could see it (which we did, and we loved it), and that also finally allowed us to see Hamilton. We had to force a very uninterested Maddie to watch it: as we always do with movies we know the girls will like, we promised that if after the first ten minutes she didn’t like it, she could go to her room and watch whatever she liked.
Behold Denmark’s newest Hamiltonian!
(She really is getting good at painting!)
The sharp cold isn’t without its advantages: it lets us take Didi on romps in some of the “messier” locations, where in other seasons it’s a struggle to keep her from immersing herself in brackish water or rolling around in mud. Hard for to do that when the water and mud are solids.
On the 17th we had a birthday dinner for Moster Mette: in honor of COVID, we sang her birthday song into our elbows (or hands: bad Daddy!). This was surreal enough that she insisted on getting a picture.
Walks along Søndersø have a very different feel after three days of sub-zero temperatures.
We watched the inauguration live on Danish television, but had to surf around to find a channel that wasn’t simulcasting a Danish translation audio. I’ve never experienced that before. (Neither have most Danes: fortunately they let their displeasure be known, so hopefully we won’t have to deal with that again.)
A note for the permanent neighborhood record: destruction of the house on a wonderful property at the end of Søndergårdsvej began this month, and it’ll be interesting to see what takes its place.
Our neighborhood is being torn down and rebuilt so rapidly it almost makes me nervous, as if I’ll come home from work one day—or, I guess, come home from a bike ride one day—and find a wrecking crew idling around our house.
And speaking of the neighborhood, Trine stumbled over this aerial shot of Værløse that a local pilot posted to the town’s Facebook group (the picture was taken on the 12th):
The lake in the middle is Søndersø. That’s the old Værløse airfield at bottom. The lake on top is Furesø. You obviously can’t see our house at this resolution, but if you see what looks like a big white “L” above and to the left of Søndersø, just imagine a horizontal line running straight down from the bottom of the L to the lake, and our house is probably sitting at about the halfway point of that line. (For a sense of scale, the path around the lake is about 5½ kilometers.)
And finally, as usual, I’ll end with my favorite meme of the month (it’s funny because it’s true):
I didn’t mention it because without a photo it didn’t really have a spot in the chronology, but Trine got her first dose of the Pfizer vax early this month, and gets her second does next Saturday. That’s a huge relief.
Our current lockdown is set to expire on February 4th, and although we’re all hoping it won’t be renewed, at this point our expectations are pretty low.
That’s it for this month… see you in February!
Wonderful. Makes me wish we could be there. Thanks.
Doug
Dad
Pop-pop