It’s January 4, a Thursday evening, as I sit myself down to begin this post. We got hit with one of the biggest snowstorms in recent years this week: northern Jylland got hit hardest, but here in Værløse it began snowing late Tuesday afternoon and snowed non-stop until about five o’clock this morning. It was rarely a heavy snow, but what it lacked in density it made up for in persistence. Thirty-six hours of snow, and we only got about six to eight inches.
Plenty of time to talk about that in the next post, when there are pictures: this post ends a few days before the storm hit.
It starts on November 28, Mormor’s birthday. We crashed the party she was throwing for just a few friends.
Per her own tradition, we were treated to roasted chestnuts.
I’m sorry to say I don’t have more pictures. (My photography was really bad in every way this month, as you’ll see.) It was a very nice party, but we had crashed it and we knew we’d really be celebrating Mormor’s 80th that weekend.
We got our first snow of the season the very next day.
And still more snow fell the day after that (the shot below is taken by the Nordhavn S-Train station, looking up Østbanegade toward AP Pension, at about 6:30 in the morning).
Here’s how it looked that evening at home.
The following day, December 1, was a Friday. The day of our Christmas Lunch at work. (It’s a fricking dinner, for God’s sake. I don’t know why it’s called a Christmas Lunch even when it begins at 19:00.)
I include this picture of my friend David only because he has never in the 17 years I’ve known him had any facial hair it all, but his team at work decided to go all-in on “Movember.” So it’s for my permanent record.
Question: if you’re Belgian, shouldn’t you have to have a twirly waxed moustache?
No interesting pictures from the party because it wasn’t a very good party and I had to leave early anyway.
Because the next day would be… December 2!
Yep, that’s Maddie at 15. The first such picture in the whole universe. (Unless she took a selfie before that. You never know.)
To Maddie’s delight, there was still snow on the ground.
Most kids dream of a White Christmas: Maddie dreams of a White Birthday. And it’s actually surprising how often she gets one.
We had a birthday breakfast at home. Not many pictures because really, who wants pictures taken on a Saturday morning? And we were in kind of a hurry for reasons that will quickly become apparent.
But the birthday girl was kind enough to allow a couple of morning pics anyway.
We had a birthday breakfast because Mormor was treating us all to an overnight trip to Ystad, Sweden, a cozy little village on the south coast of Sweden, most familiar to Danes as the port where you catch the ferries to Bornholm and Poland. It was how she wanted to celebrate her 80th birthday, even if it meant sharing honors with the other birthday girl (pictured above).
The drive was only a little over two hours. From the moment we crossed the bridge, we could see our little snowstorms had hit Sweden a little harder than they’d hit us. The Swedish countryside was blanketed in snow and it was pleasant to roll along through it. Very picturesque.
We arrived at the hotel—the Continental Du Sud—around 12:30.
The lobby was elaborately but tastefully decorated for Christmas. . .
But the outdoor patio bar didn’t look very appealing.
(Trine had asked for quiet rooms, and the desk clerk had told us the room she’d given us was overlooking the patio bar, which could get quite noisy sometimes, but she didn’t think it would be a problem that night. And reader, it wasn’t.)
Mormor and Moster Mette had come up on the train and met us at the hotel.
Oh, and look: I was there, too!
Mormor had booked us the hotel’s traditional Christmas dinner for that evening, something for which it’s renowned, so although we knew we shouldn’t fill up, we also knew we were all pretty hungry and that it was time for lunch. With no plan at all, we wandered out into the streets of Ystad looking for a lunch.
We agreed Maddie could pick where we ate (within reason). No more than 100 meters from the hotel we stumbled over a Pinchos, and that was that.
Afterwards we took a long stroll through town.
Say your name is Richard Lindström. You’re one of those Richards who prefers to go by Dick. You’re a photographer and you open your own shop: “Dick Lindström, Photographer.” But you need a website.
What to call it?
Ooh, ooh! Pick me!
Funny guy, that Dick Lindström.
The icicles hanging off the old buildings were so picturesque they looked fake. (The whole town had the feel of a Disneyfied version of Scandinavia, like Anna and Elsa were going to pop up around every next corner.)
I’d thought the hotel’s outdoor patio bar was optimistic, but the courtyard of that building took the cake:
Soon the sun was setting—no, it wasn’t an especially long lunch or walk, it was just Sweden in December—so we decided we’d wrap things up by finding our way to a café and warming ourselves up a bit.
We then went back to the hotel to warm ourselves up even more and get ready for our fabulous dinner, a celebration of Mormor’s 80th and Maddie’s 15th: an aggregated 95 years to fejre!
Remember what I said about this post having some horrible photography?
I apologize profusely for these dinner photos, which are, I swear, the best ones I got.
…but someday AI will be able to sharpen those right up, right?
Please?
I love the next picture for the emotional juxtaposition.
And at least I got some good pictures:
It was a fantastic meal we could barely finish—and not for want of desire. It was simply too much food, and all of it too good.
We all went to bed after dinner—we played a game of cards at an open table in the restaurant, but it was a quick game and by the time it was over we all just wanted to pass out.
The next morning we had breakfast and pointed ourselves west: Mormor and Moster Mette by train, the four of us by car.
We stopped at the big mall in Malmö to do some Christmas shopping.
If you just glanced at that photo thinking it was a close-up of a weird ornament or something, give it another look: the perspective is looking down from the 2nd or 3rd floor of the mall onto the “Christmas Tree” (read: conical conglomeration of ornaments) rising from the ground floor.
By the time we got home there was barely time to light the candles for the first Advent of the season.
Closeup of the mice-en-scène tableau in the one Advent candleholder:
(Sorry. I just had to use mice-en-scène.)
It had obviously been a very busy (and very nice) weekend, so it’s understandable that there’s not a single other picture in my camera roll until the following Sunday, the second Advent.
Mormor had been to Kongens Nytorv that weekend, and sent us this picture of D’Angleterre all gussied up for Christmas.
One December afternoon or evening I’d noticed Molli down in the basement and had asked what she was doing.
She said she was painting. Seemed reasonable enough.
A few days later I was down there and stumbled across her artwork:
KAN IKKE MALE, it says.
Or, in English, CAN NOT PAINT.
I texted her that photo along with my sympathy: “Me neither.”
Yeah, Daddy can’t paint either, sweet Molli.
(Or photograph, as we have seen. I mean, I’m not the worst, but I’m no Dick Lindström!)
Now we fast forward to the last weekend before Christmas.
We got our tree at the usual place. None of the usual pictures of us meandering around the lot this year, and no distractions from the prime minister: we zeroed in on, selected, and purchased our tree in about five minutes. Not an exaggeration. There was no time for pictures. In fact, I’d say the time elapsed from our getting into the car to my having the tree set up in the living room was about forty-five minutes at the absolute maximum.
I’ll get more into this kind of thing more in the posts ahead, but I’ve already scanned all the Nana and Pop Pop photos I brought home from America. Mixed in with a bunch of baby pictures of me was this:
How fricking modern was that in 1965? A computer punch card coupon! Did the stores have mainframes to read these sophisticated penny-pinchers, or what? (Also, I love that 5 cents was considered an inducement. Or maybe not. What I really want to know is why Mom held onto this coupon!)
Anyway, we eventually got the tree (and living room) decorated…
And by the morning of the 23rd (a Saturday) we had snow on the ground. Could it last?
It was still hanging in there that afternoon when I romped Didi in the woods.
Sill hanging in that evening. . .
And BOOM! Christmas Eve:
That counts as a white Christmas in Denmark, so we win!
(Barely. By the time we sat down to Christmas dinner it was raining and the snow was washed away within hours. Good thing we celebrate on the 24th!)
Here’s everyone getting ready to watch the last episode of Valdes Jul—the best Christmas calendar serial we’ve had in years.
And finally, Christmas Eve dinner.
… which I myself attended!
For previous Christmases, to fill the gap between dinner and dance-around-the-tree time, I’ve designed videos, quizzes, Kahoots, and multimedia trivia games that have all been fun but have always been too long, too technically complicated, too American, too something.
This year I had GPT4 help me out. We developed a trivia game with just ten multiple choice questions about quirky Christmas traditions around the world, with Danish and English versions. Everyone got one card for each possible answer (A, B, C, D). Every correct answer to a question earned players a poker chip.
It was fast, it was fun, no one felt left out, and that’s going to be the new normal. Just so you know.
(I actually forget who won. Trine, I think, but it was a close-run thing.)
Dancing around the tree time:
Then present time (heh):
Then, for the second (third? fourth? ninth?) year in a row, it’s getting late and Daddy realizes: WAIT! I don’t have the annual picture of The Girls By the Tree!
Such beauties!
Maddie had to go down to the basement to play with her new wah pedal, and she let Molli play with her axe. I love this picture to death:
Christmas day romp with Didi in the woods: she found a 12-foot stick she wanted to play with, got a grip on its thin end and couldn’t understand why she couldn’t just trot away with it.
Another picture sent to us by Mormor: Christmas Tivoli. I didn’t make it this year, and that’s the first time I haven’t since moving here. (Unless it was closed during Covid. I no longer remember.)
Remember our perfect Christmas tree, the one we only took five minutes to choose?
We forgot to water it.
By Christmas day, it would shed needles if you even thought about it.
Which was fine by me, because I’m a Christmas-is-over-on-the-26th kind of guy. So on the 27th we reclaimed the whole house.
That’s pretty much exactly how it had looked on November 30, so it’s no big deal, but after all the Christmas clutter of December it always feels like such a breath of fresh air—like having a whole new, clean, fresh space. It must be how goldfish feel when you change the water in their tank.
Maddie invested some of her Christmas booty in a new ear piercing.
Those are the only pictures from the week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve.
We took it slow that week. Trine and I watched one Mission Impossible movie each night, in order. So we’re all caught up on that franchise, if you have any questions.
For New Year’s Eve we were joined by Kirsten and her youngest, Johan, and four of Maddie’s friends. (Molli was at a party with her own friends.) Kirsten’s eldest, Julius, joined us after dinner.
We were in the middle of dinner when we suddenly realized it was time for the queen’s New Year’s speech. I’m certainly glad we caught it this year, because it was Epic and Historical.
“…whether the time had come to hand over responsibility to the next generation.”
“I have decided that now is the right time.”
“On January 14th, 2024, 52 years after I succeeded my beloved father…”
“…I will step down as Denmark’s queen.”
Yeah.
That was kind of surreal.
All I had really expected was to get a picture of her traditional closing line—which I did eventually get:
But this year, and this year only, her “closing” line of “God bless Denmark” was followed by another line:
“God bless all of you.”
The whole nation of Denmark was verklempt.
But we got over it and moved on to dinner… the usual fondue.
A few hours later, and it was time for the countdown to the New Year.
And then it was 2024, and pretty much everyone who ever looks at this blog was in contact with us one way or another within a few moments of that.
And you know what? We do get wiser as we get older, because after 20 years in Denmark I finally realized there are few things more boring than pictures of fireworks. So none of those this year.
We all slept late on New Year’s Day. I got up, had a cup of coffee, showered, and—as usual—used a towel to clean my glasses after the shower.
As is not usual, they fell apart in my hands.
So… happy new year, and look forward to pictures of me in fabulous new glasses in the next post!
Finally: my favorite internet memes of the period.
That’s it. Happy 2024!
