Okay well where to begin. Well like I said in my last blog post, Christmas is an entire month long celebration. So for the past 27 days I've been opening advent gifts and eating advent chocolate and scratching advent lottery calendars (I was one Christmas tree away from 1,000,000 kroner, ONE!) to get excited for Christmas.
And then last Thursday all the big Christmas stuff finally started. I had a julefrokost (Christmas lunch) with my old class, which was so nice. We ate a ton of traditional Danish food, and they got drunk under parental supervision (something I'm still getting used to) and we watched julekalendar, more specifically Jule i Valhal (a show that's played every day leading up to Christmas about 2 children that go off to this other world and are friends with the Nordic Gods) and ate ris alamande (rice pudding, ONE OF MY FAVORITE THINGS ABOUT DENMARK, and there's chopped almonds in it, and the one that finds the whole almond gets a mantle gift). There were 2 mantle gifts, Rudolph antlers and a nose, and penis glasses. Yes penis glasses ohh Danish humor. Then we headed off to the school to have a school fest, and it was all very fun and hyggeligt.
Me and Maja
Can't get over their humor
Me, Sofie, and Trine
Then on Sunday my host family and I cleaned the entire house and made candy in preparation for having Christmas Eve AND Christmas Day at our house. It also snowed, but unfortunately the snow didn't hold out for Christmas </3.
Wahhhh
Danes celebrate Christmas on Christmas Eve, so on Monday we got up and went to church (the first and probably last time I will go to church in Denmark, most Danes aren't very religious) fun fact, the church in my town is like, 800 years old, and it was a really pivotal part of a very bloody war between Denmark and Sweden in the 1500's, and so now there's a sword hanging in the church, and legend has it that if it ever falls the war will re-continue ooooo. Then my host grandparents, host uncle and cousins and host uncle's girlfriend all came over and we had a DELICIOUS CHRISTMAS DINNER. I'll post another blog about the differences between Denmark and the US's Christmases, so you can read about it there. Then we danced around the tree (very traditional and unique experience) and spent the next like, 3? hours opening allll the presents under the tree. After that, exhausted, we collapsed into bed.
Christmas decorations
They use hearts as decorations for Christmas which I find really cute.
Our 10 billion advent candles
Christmas tree with all our presents!
All the kids
Lucio, the exchange student from Argentina that I'm currently living with
Christmas table
They light real candles on the tree, but only for when we're dancing around it
My host cousins literally crawled under the tree looking for presents
Min sød værstfamilie
Then for Christmas Day, we had 26 guests over, which I thought would be impossible because we have a pretty small house, but it actually worked out really well. They were all my host dad's family, and get this, they're all half Oregonian! Half of them have lived in Seaside and my host cousin was looking at moving back to Oregon and it was so crazy, like a little piece of home. We also played pakkeleg, this crazy game where everyone brings a gift and puts it on the table, and then we pass around dice and whenever you roll a 6, you can take a gift. Once all the gifts have been taken, you take them from each other and it gets pretty intense. I won some body butter from the Body Shop which was basically perfect.
And then no, Christmas does not end with Christmas, so on the 26th we went over to my host grandparents (on my host mom's side, the ones we spent Christmas Eve with because my other host grandparents live in OREGON) and ate even MORE FOOD. Danes certainly win the most crazy about Christmas award like I can't even I loved it.
It was such a nice and HUGE Christmas and I'm actually really sad that my Danish Christmas is finally over. Today I'm gonna go into Copenhagen and buy some Danish Christmas stuff to take home so I can attempt to celebrate a Danish Christmas next year too!
Alicia
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