This is the blog I haven’t been able to do for a while. There are 37½ pictures and two videos. They’re small videos, so I won’t even frontload them here.
First, a couple of phone pictures from November. We’re not good about emptying our phones. At least, we weren’t until when just recently when we discovered we could Bluetooth them directly into the laptop.
One November afternoon Molli Malou and I were invited to a party at Liam’s school. He goes to the French School, which is, I think, named for the current Queen’s husband, Prince Henri, who is French.
When we arrived, the main room had been transformed into a preteen ballroom: a dozen girls were singing and dancing their hearts out along to the music from some loudspeakers.
So here in this French school in the heart of Copenhagen, what do you think those girls were singing and dancing along to?
Why, that great classic of Franco-Danish Culture, “High School Musical,” of course! Molli Malou and Liam jumped right in.
Then Molli Malou stepped aside to have her face painted.
Is this the face of submission, or what?
Once she was properly flowered up, she was ready to tear up the rug with Liam some more.
No, wait… see the video (tiny, so watch at 200% or bigger).
And now let’s skip ahead to Thanksgiving. Ours was non-traditional. I took that Friday off from work and cooked all night Thursday and all day Friday and the meal came out spectacularly (I measure against my own previous performances only). Morfar, Mormor, and Jørgen joined us for Molli Malou’s first sentient Turkey Gorging Ritual.
Molli Malou loved it.
Which is pretty easy to see.
In the foreground of the picture above you can’t even tell our turkey was a boneless stuffed bird. It had drumstick bones, and wing bones, but none other. It was like a deflated balloon with wings and drumsticks, except the butcher then “inflated it” with some fancy gourmet stuffing consisting of veal and pork and wild rice or grain and god knows what. I didn’t care: I’d shelled out the big bucks (at 55 DKK, it was 11 US dollars per package, no exaggeration) for the Stove Top stuffing, and it was worth every kroner.
Our next Nagan family Thanksgiving is going to be tough, because we have yet another drumstick fan in the family.
Well, yeah, so Thanksgiving came and went. Holy hell I’m behind, we’re going to have to keep a mighty brisk pace.
One day Molli Malou asked me to paint her “like a fish.”
Clownfish? I don’t know, I did what I could.
But she obviously liked it, right?
Obviously she’s delighted?
Well, yeah. For about five minutes. Then she decided she wanted to “finish the fish face” on her own. It was a Saturday or Sunday, so I offered no resistance. I handed her the box of face paints.
You saw where this was headed, right?
Hey, that’s a great look Molli Malou, but there’s still a spot of forehead you haven’t got to yet…
Oh. All right then.
It was about then she looked at me and said, “Daddy, YOU need to have also your face painted.”
(Yes, that is how she speaks sometimes: the placement of certain adverbs is different in Danish and English, and she tends to make her mistakes favoring Danish placement.)
I allowed her to paint my face, and I think she did a spectacular job (relative only to… well, to what you’d expect from a three-year-old).
Christmas Lunch season began early this year: my first work Christmas Lunch was held on November 30th. I have told you all about Danish Christmas lunches. There are great new Christmas Lunch stories every year, but this one is especially fun:
“What’s all that?” Trine asked me as I struggled to regain consciousness the morning after. “Did you go to a nightclub with an aggressive doorman, or what?”
“We didn’t go to a nightclub,” I said, but in honesty I wasn’t really sure. I didn’t know what she meant.
She shook her head.
“If you weren’t so fat you’d look like a concentration camp victim,” she said.
“Huh?” I said.
But she was already wandering back after Molli Malou.
I got up and looked at myself in the mirror. Stamped on my neck, face, and forearms in big fat black numerals was the engimatic “667.”
“What the hell,” I wondered.
I didn’t have the energy to wash it off until late in the afternoon. But around lunchtime I remembered I’d had my camera with me at the Christmas Lunch, and I remembered having taken some pictures. Do you want to guess what the last picture from the previous evening was?
That’s René. He’s a great guy, a big gentle bear of a guy under normal circumstances, and a die-hard Patriots friend. But as you can see in the above photo he can apparently also be the face of pure evil.
I was very sheepish going into work on Monday. My god, if I couldn’t remember René savaging me with 667s, what else couldn´t I remember? Had I been a total drunken staggering idiot slob? I was so embarrassed!
But not for long. As people started filing into the office, I kept overhearing more and more people telling one another, always awkwardly at first, “Do you know… I woke up with all these 667 stamps on me… and I can’t actually remember…”
Even the executive in charge of the whole huge project couldn’t remember. The lead SAP consultant couldn’t remember. What I love about Denmark is that no one was embarrassed or angry. They all just wondered, “Say, how on earth did I come to be covered in 667s?”
But Greg’s magic camera was still in his briefcase. I popped the memory card into the laptop, brought that image onto my screen, and was instantly the savior of our office. The image was immediately printed several dozen times in full color and hung up all over the office with the legend, “STAMP MAN.” (In Danish, obviously: STEMPELMAND.)
Poor René. In the end he was the only one who felt a little sheepish.
But by next year he’ll be the hero of the story.
Later that awful hungover day after, we went to see the lighting of the tree at Frederiksberg Rådhusplads. We got there at twilight.
It was a beautiful scene. There were open fires with marshmallow roasting for the kids, lots of gløgg and hot cocoa to be had, and a Santa Claus wandering around with little cookies for the kids.
We were happy. Molli Malou had her first toasted marshmallow.
And here she is suddenly noticing Santa Claus is just a few feet away. Think she gets Christmas this year?
But we’re here for the lighting of the tree. So… Before:
And after:
John, Sandie, and Liam met us at the lighting. Afterwards we swung by Centret. The stores were closed, but still more proof that we have reached the age of understanding Christmas:
And now it’s Christmas Calendar season. Every evening we lower the lights, play Christmas music, light the Christmas Calendar candle (and on Sundays the Advent candles), and Molli Malou gets to open her Christmas Calendar for that day (revealing a piece of candy) and get a little calendar present. I present the calendar shots without further annotation. They’re from different nights, obviously, but taken together they tell the whole story.
Oh, wait… digression… the cool hat… Hey, toots!
Did you think I was kidding about the ½ picture? I don’t know how this happened…
Back to the calendar shots…
And that’s it for now.
Dear 667, I know what a double 0 means but what does a double 6 mean? I would suggest licensed to drink? Lovely pictures and videos. I especially liked hiya toots. AML Dad (pop-pop)