Before we get into the current stuff, a quick flashback.
I covered Klaus’s October 1 party in a previous post, where I think I mentioned I’d brought the Olympus but had forgotten to charge it. That was true, but I did manage to squeeze off a couple of shots before the battery died.
I found them when I unloaded the Olympus from the Christmas pictures in this post.
Nothing really special, but it’s nice to start with pictures that feature a little green.
November was very cold, as I think I noted in the last post, and we made a lot of fires.
A lot of those November evenings looked like this from my perspective:
Didi loves to sit there in the corner of the couches and can get very insistent that we skritch her head.
Emma’s preferred place this fall has been the seat at the end of our dining room table. She’s usually curled up in a ball on the chair, but as someone as someone sits at the table she pops up to see what’s going on, and she has quite an authoritative presence.
I called you all here today…
Note for the permanent record: on November 16 I broke the 8000 km mark on my “new” bike.
If I’d kept up the original pace I’d have nearly double that on the odometer, but with all the various lockdowns and the transition to working only three days a week at the office even when not locked down, I’m not racking up the miles the way I had been. All the same, 8000 kilometers in 2½ years is still pretty good.
Mormor celebrated her birthday earlier than usual this year: we gathered at Lyøvej one Saturday afternoon more than a week before her actual birthday to fete her.
As usual Mormor had prepared roasted chestnuts, and the girls had been salivating in anticipation the whole drive down from Værløse. I’d never realized how much they like roasted chestnuts.
One new twist: black salt.
Tasted the same as white salt, but I’d never seen black salt before and that’s why I took a picture of it.
And for once there’s an actual picture of me, and it’s not a half-assed selfie:
…which isn’t to say it’s not a half-assed picture.
Or half-headed.
“Let me get a picture with you in it,” says the photographer.
And she gets a shot of my head behind a lampshade—with Molli in the middle of a gigantic yawn.
Try again?
Nice shot of me, I guess, but not the best of Jørgen…
Eventually we hopped on the metro to the restaurant on Christianshavn. The front seats were available, and I made Maddie sit with me and pretend to steer the train the way she loved to as a child. (The metro actually has stickers on the front of every train with pretend buttons and switches on them for kids to play with.)
It was a quick but very cold walk from the metro to the restaurant…
But the restaurant was comfortably warm.
I can’t remember the name of the place, and am much too lazy to look it up, but it was a sort of novelty restaurant in that they only had two seatings, and everyone at each seating was served the same meal.
Seating was at long tables that could accommodate up to 16, so everyone’s sharing a table with strangers. The wait staff comes along with big serving dishes of everything, and you just help yourself to whatever’s served.
It was a lovely meal; I’ll just post all the pictures without any comment.
That night—November 19—we got our first snow of the year, so we woke up to a light dusting.
That Sunday night we got even more snow, and this time it was more substantial.
Maddie was in heaven: her birthday was less than two weeks away, and already there was snow on the ground!
I know I include a lot of stupid pictures on this blog, and the next two are right up there with the stupidest of them. I include them only because I love their aesthetic: they have no significance (“oh my god you guys check it out we had a fire!”), I just like how they look.
Aly Metzger and most of her family swung through Copenhagen on a visit, so we arranged to spend an afternoon with them at Tivoli.
I went there straight from work and got a bunch of pictures of Christmas Tivoli while it was still light out.
To pass the time I got an Irish coffee that rocked my world.
Our crowd included people with very different opinions on what rides were and were not fun, but we all agreed on the Milky Way—the revamped Odin Express.
I’d fallen out of touch with Aly’s brother years ago and had given up trying to re-establish contact, but Aly convinced me to give it another shot, so I just emailed him the photo above with a very short text (I didn’t want to put much effort into it if it was just going to be ignored) and lo and behold, a few days later he did in fact respond, and we’ve had a few emails back and forth since then.
The only other ride we all agreed on was the Flying Trunk.
Maddie’s school picture arrived, and it absolutely did justice to its fabulous subject.
Atheneskolen had a lot of field trips as we got closer to the Christmas break, and Maddie messaged me this picture of a candle she was making on one such trip.
I know nothing else about that trip or what ever happened to that candle: I just include the pic on the longstanding principle that if the girls consider something meaningful enough to send me, it deserves a place in the permanent record.
Now this next picture is truly odd:
It’s not odd because of its content: that’s a delicious dish I made, roasted brussels sprouts with parmesan and garlic. What’s odd is that it’s a dish I made for Thanksgiving, which we celebrated up at Steve & Elisabeth’s. That’s very clearly their dining room table: it’s their tablecloth, and we don’t even own a serving spoon, glass, or plate resembling those in the picture. And yet I don’t have a single other picture from the dinner. I don’t specifically remember taking any pictures at Thanksgiving, but neither do I remember not taking any pictures. It just seems very odd that the only damn photo I’d take of our whole glorious Thanksgiving feast would be a stupid shot of a bunch of brussels sprouts.
Go figure.
Anyway, I do have a shot of the first Advent Sunday, which was the day after we celebrated Thanksgiving.
Which takes us directly to the morning of December 2, always a happy day in our house!
Maddie’s 14th birthday.
We’re long past the days when I would dedicate whole posts to the girls’ birthdays… back when I’d post pictures from every year of their life (every month, in the early years). All part of the natural order of things, I suppose.
At her own request the birthday was celebrated with a Hai Long dinner. Her big sister had to work, but all the rest of her closest maternal relations were able to attend.
We’ll start with a few shots of the birthday breakfast… Well, one of the setup and one of the birthday girl.
Thence we advance to the birthday dinner.
Fact: I have no idea what was going on with Maddie’s hair.
After dinner, back home.
Maddie was pleased with the headset she got for her birthday.
My favorite picture of her birthday—actually one of my favorite Maddie shots of the year:
And that’s it for the birthday festivities.
Another shot of burning embers… I love the aesthetic, sue me.
Speaking of aesthetics: here’s our kitchen one early December evening just one mere step away from completion.
It was completed a week or so later, and now I can assure you that the next post will indeed be the “House Renovations 2023” post.
This year’s Christmas calendar shows were Julehjertets hemmelighed (“The Secret of the Christmas Heart”) on TV2 and, over on DR, Tinka: Sjælens Spejl (“Tinka: The Mirror of the Soul”), a third installment of the apparently popular Tinka franchise.
The three of us who watch these things found both shows very well done and much more in harmony with Christmas than a lot of the more recent offerings.
The three of us humans, I should have said: Didi was also a big fan and thought Tinka was just riveting.
Just a few days after Maddie’s birthday, a fresh coating of snow.
…an event so significant that Emma called an emergency board meeting.
And suddenly it’s already the third Sunday of Advent.
Not a bad Sunday, but as we slept Sunday morning our boiler broke down and we woke up to an unheated home.
Fortunately the heat guy lives only 800 meters away from us and was able to swing by the house and fix the boiler (an electronic part had failed) before noon. A chilly and expensive morning, but could have been a lot worse (and a lot more expensive).
Our new oven is a little more high tech than I think necessary. Also kind of bossy.
Even weirder, it sends us text messages whenever it’s done cooking something or wants its water changed.
We were late getting our Christmas tree this year, mostly because we kept putting it off because we wanted to be able to do it as a foursome. Eventually we realized that was never gonna happen, the scheduling just couldn’t be made to work, so Trine and Maddie and I just hopped in the car and set out to get our tree the Sunday before Christmas… just six days before our big holiday of Christmas Eve.
We thought we’d try a new place this year, mainly because they offered free cocoa, glögg, and æbleskiver to anyone buying a tree, but they only had a handful of trees and they all looked like Charlie Brown rejects. So we drove all the way back home and then the little three kilometers to the usual place in Hareskov.
I took this picture very surreptitiously while waiting to have our tree netted:
Why surreptitiously?
Because it was supposed to be a sneak shot of our prime minister, who was there buying her own Christmas tree.
But as I snapped the pic, the tree netter bent down, and Santa took a step leftward, and Mette Frederiksen is therefore blotted entirely out of the picture.
“Picture or it didn’t happen” rules have to be interpreted pretty liberally in this case, but it did happen.
In fact, we ended up behind the prime minister in the checkout line of the giftshop. (Where she took forever.)
I am no fan of Mette Frederiksen’s politics, but I think it’s wonderful that she was buying her tree at the same lot we were (she lives in the area), and no one made any kind of a fuss about her—even if I wasn’t the only one trying to sneak a shot of her. Can you imagine trying to buy a tree at the same lot as an American president? Imagine the secret service presence, the snipers in the forest around you, the probable requirement of showing ID just to be in the president’s vicinity. The helicopters overhead, the motorcade filling the parking lot.
I prefer the Danish model: the PM drives up in a station wagon like anyone else.
Anyway, we got the tree home and on Sunday I set it up.
The tree seemed to make Didi a little melancholy:
That Sunday was also the fourth of Advent.
And speaking of Advents, here’s a 6½ minute video that covers the last 13 years of Advents. There aren’t pictures or videos from all of them, but there are from most of them.
I didn’t have time to edit it as nicely as I’d have liked to—the holiday crunch got to me—but it’s nice to have all the years in one place. (About thirty seconds in there’s a lot of background noise while Trine and little Molli light the candle: that noise is toddler Maddie rumbling around the living room, as you can see her doing just a few seconds later in a from a few days later—clearly December 2!)
So now we’re in the home stretch.
I want a tidied up version of this next picture painted by Norman Rockwell, and by god some day I’m going to ask an AI bot to do that for me.
So hygge watching the Christmas calendars every night…
Trine’s homemade candied almonds, or whatever we call brændte mandler in English:
Ah! And now it’s Christmas Eve day. How can I tell? Because DR is playing It’s a Wonderful Life…
For Christmas Eve I pulled out the Olympus and started out getting a lot of pictures of our home in all its Christmas glory.
I know, I know: you’re thinking, Those are some really nice shots of the house, Greg, but how come the first Christmas Eve picture with a human being in it (far left) is such a dark blurry mess?
It’s because just as all the guests had arrived and we were all scrambling to fire up the ovens and stovetop and start our Christmas Eve in earnest, BLAM! we lost all power.
This wasn’t just a damn fuse in the fusebox again: this was the whole neighborhood. Most of Værløse actually. Most of Furesø, in fact.
We scrambled to adjust, getting all the candles and flashlights and battery-powered lamps we could fired up. The following pictures are mostly pretty lousy, but I thought it was important to document our first (and hopefully only) blackout Christmas.
I even coaxed everyone into a group shot—and believe it or not, there was still no electricity in the house at this point.
Trine’s carving up the duck, which had already been roasted, in the light of the flashlight suspend above the counter:
Fortunately the blackout only lasted about half an hour, and in that time the indoor temperature only dropped about 1½ degrees Celsius.
Now some boring pictures of our Christmas treats:
Molli was especially proud of the Christmas konfekt she’d made to resemble an ornament and a gift, and she specifically asked me to get closeups.
I had just lit a fire before we lost power, and with the loss of the chimney fan the young fire died and smouldered—but to our great relief as soon as the electricity kicked back in, the fire sprang back to life and was burning beautifully within just five or ten minutes.
And finally it was really Christmas Eve.
After dinner we played the board game Hint, which we’d purchased specifically for the occassion on Molli’s recommendation.
After the game it was time for the risalamande, then a quick dance around the tree, and finally time to attack the presents under the tree.
None of the gift-opening pics came out very well, but I feel compelled to include at least one to document evidence that there were indeed gifts and they were indeed very enthusiastically received.
It got very late very quickly, and it was soon time to draw the night to a close.
Molli had offered to drive Mormor to the train station (and Moster Mette home), and they timed their departure very carefully so that Mormor wouldn’t have to wait too long in the cold.
But the car never ended up leaving our driveway: the car was dead.
Moster Mette walked home and Mormor spent the night in the guest room.
That covers our holiday season. We’re all up to date. And that’s a wrap on 2022: it’s New Year’s Eve as I finish this post. Molli will of course be going out to a party: Trine, Maddie, Mette, and I will be celebrating at home with the usual fondue and fireworks.
In fact, I need to get going on my day, so will give this a very quick edit and then publish it.
But wait! My favorite internet memes of the month…
I don’t remember where on the internet I saw this, but it’s a great visual metaphor for what I want to do in January—what I think we all want to do in January.
And a bonus image this month: the world’s worst hide-and-seek bear:
Happy New Year, and here’s hoping that 2023 is a better year for the world than 2022.
Or 2021.
Or 2020…
