Fantastically, we woke up Christmas Eve to thick white snow blanketing the world! Or rather, Trine and Molli woke up to it then woke me up to it several hours later. It was rich, beautiful, holiday perfect snow.
“It could only be more perfect if it was Christmas today,” I said.
Trine (and Molli?) rolled their eyes and reminded me that we were in Denmark. It was Christmas!
Despite her general obliviousness to the holiday, even the temperamentally cheerful Molli seemed unusually upbeat. She spent a good chunk of the morning and early afternoon amusing herself with the familiar Al Bear, her only non-jingling, non-rattling, non-clinking toy up until last night. (We got some great video of her long conversation with the strangely silent bear.)
As evening finally drew upon us, Trine got Molli dolled up in her official Christmas outfit. She looked adorable in it, but kept pulling the hat down over her face so eventually we had to remove that accessory. (It was strange to me not that she pulled it over her face, but that she didn’t seem to mind having it over her face. She’d just kind of murmur happily and wave her hands about in front of her like someone gone suddenly happily blind. Yes, I have pictures of that, but I’m on a storage budget here and can’t share everything.)
You can see her mounting excitement in this photograph:
(I’ll let you decide to whom the possessive pronoun belongs in the previous sentence.)
Our skanky little tree actually looked beautiful once darkness fell and we lit the candles and I had my first drink—in much the same way, I suppose, that skanky people can sometimes look beautiful once darkness falls, candles are lit, and alcohol is consumed.
Molli was a dream for most of the evening. Here she is with Jørgen:
And with Trine:
And with Mormor (you’ll notice she’s beginning to drop off a bit here):
And with me:
You can tell she’s of two minds in that last shot: she’s trying to be a good sport, but she’s obviously on the edge of exhaustion (as evidenced in the shot with Mormor). This was even more obvious in person than it was on digital film, so we decided to get her into some presents before she conked out completely.
She handled her first Christmas present exactly as predicted. At first she was entranced by the brightly colored paper and curious ribbon.
Then she gave the gift itself a cursory inspection.
Then she returned her attention to the brightly colored paper, which entertained her and Ollie until it was plainly time to put her to bed.
And yet she seemed to know it was Christmas. She would not go down without a fight. At about this time I made my first call to Chelmsford, and Molli got to hear Aunt Deb wish her a Merry Christmas.
Not long afterwards she went down for good. This morning I was the last to rise, again, and after Trine fed her a hearty Christmas breakfast of banana rice porridge we began presenting her with some of her Christmas presents—without the distraction of wrapping paper and ribbons.
She fell immediately in love with this as-yet-unnamed critter from Farmor and Farfar:
The girls are now enjoying an afternoon nap and I’ve taken advantage of their absence to post this. Merry Christmas & Glædelig Jul!
