The Year of Living Danishly

by Helen Russell

  ‘Ahhh … snow!’ Lego Man exclaims with glee. It’s been at least two days since we’ve had fresh snowfall and Lego Man is excited at the prospect of breaking out yet more recently acquired technical outdoor gear. But for once, it’s not actually snowing. This white stuff is something else entirely.

  ‘I think…’ I start, before blinking and looking again, just to be sure, ‘I think it’s foam.’ I didn’t spend two weeks in the Costa de Sol as an impressionable teenager for nothing: I know professional-grade bubbles when I see them. Nonetheless, the place suddenly looks incredibly festive and after paying, we take to the streets to investigate.

  The lorry comes to a standstill and the tailgate lowers to reveal a gang of girls in small blue outfits and men dressed in boiler suits congregating around a diminutive, dark-haired man. He’s sporting a mega-watt smile and aviator sunglasses, despite the fact that it’s been dark since 3.30pm.

  ‘Is that … Tom Cruise?’ Lego Man squints at the tiny figure.

  I feel very sober indeed and try to break it to him gently: ‘I think it’s supposed to be…’ I’m pretty confident that the world’s most famous Scientologist hasn’t come to hang out in rural Jutland for the weekend.

  The looka(little)like greets fans with a wave and they cheer and whoop while the other Top Gun extras hand out flammable-looking blue Santa hats and plastic aviators. Then the womenfolk step forward and we see that they are dressed as air stewardesses. Lego Man is appalled.

  ‘There are no air hostesses in Top Gun! You don’t have stewards on a fighter jet! That would be totally impractical! Not to mention unnecessary…’ His outrage at the factual inaccuracies of the tableau seems to know no bounds, but I can’t help feeling there are bigger fish to fry. Maverick and his lady friends are now lobbing glass bottles of beer into the crowd. The assembled throng is becoming larger, louder and less able to stay upright as the foam disintegrates, leaving the street slippery with soap. And yet the scantily clad flight attendants and Denmark’s answer to Tom Cruise are throwing glass missiles.

  I ask a semi-sober-looking woman standing next to me what’s going on and she tells me that this is ‘J-Dag’ or ‘J-Day’ when the festive beer, julebryg, is traditionally delivered to every town in Denmark by horse and cart. At least, that’s what happens in Copenhagen. Here, we get an articulated lorry.

  J-Day marks the unofficial start of Christmas in Denmark, when bars and restaurants serve festive beer from 9pm and promotional teams from the brewery dole out a few hundred freebies to get the party started.

  ‘I should probably try it, since we’re here,’ says Lego Man, eyeing up the folk around him who are now glugging down their julebryg. I’m about to comment on how magnanimous he is, willing to overlook the besmirching of his favourite film for the sake of some free lager, but he’s already disappeared into the crowd.

  ‘Be careful!’ I call out, dodging carbonated glass grenades.

  He comes back victorious, clutching a bottle above his head like a football trophy.

  ‘Well done.’

  ‘Thanks,’ he nods, accepting the praise before cracking the bottle open and taking a hearty swig.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘It’s … strong. Sort of liquorice-y.’

  My nose wrinkles involuntarily, ‘God, they put that stuff in everything round here!’ A sing-song starts up in Danish, of what sounds like some sort of beer-based anthem to the tune of Jingle Bells, while more lager missiles are thrown out. ‘Danes must have excellent hand-eye coordination,’ I remark. ‘I haven’t heard a single bottle smash.’

  ‘That, or they really love beer,’ replies Lego Man taking another swig. ‘And I’ll be honest, it’s pretty good. You wouldn’t want any to go to waste.’

  After Tom Cruise and his team have strewn their stash, the truck rolls out of town and everyone decamps to the nearest bar. We meet up with Helena C and The Viking and the merriment continues. Feeling horrifically sober, I try to imagine that I’m conducting some sort of important indigenous analysis, like a heavily pregnant Bruce Parry in Tribe. But it’s hard to get the bottom of an anthropological phenomenon when everyone you try to talk to has drunk a lot (and I mean A Lot) and honks of liquorice. So I leave Lego Man to it with the usual suspects after an hour or so and head home.

  The next morning, I call on the good people behind J-Day to tell me more.

  ‘It all started from a TV ad that ran for the first time in 1980,’ says Jens (another one!) Bekke from Carlsberg, the company that brews the Tuborg beers, including the julebryg. The advert was a rudimentary animation, depicting Santa and Rudolph forgoing their Christmas duties in pursuit of a Tuborg truck to the twinkly sound of ‘Jingle Bells’. The subtext, I discover when I watch the ad on YouTube, seems to be that Santa and his helper are borderline alcoholics. Nevertheless, the commercial drove better than expected sales and so has been screened every winter since. ‘It’s probably the only advertisement in the world that hasn’t changed in more than 30 years,’ says Jens. Neither, apparently, has the beer. The strong 5.6 per cent ABV pilsner was invented by mixing three other beers together and is said to be a good accompaniment to smoked fish, herring, pork, duck … and more julebryg. ‘We keep the beer the same every year, as well as the packaging and the TV advert,’ Jens tells me, ‘because Danes love tradition!’ I mention that I’d noticed this. ‘Plus we’d get protests from all over the country if we changed people’s Christmas beer!’

  Julebryg is so popular that despite only being on the market for ten weeks a year, it’s Denmark’s fourth best-selling beer. In other words, Danes fill their boots.

  ‘Screening the ad marks the start of the Christmas festivities for many people,’ says Jens, ‘and from 1990 onwards, we got the idea to travel around the country handing out julebryg to mark the start of its time on sale.’ Now, 500 Carlsberg employees visit 500 locations each year for J-Day. At each stop, they sing a bastardisation of Jingle Bells with lyrics that translate along the lines of:

  Julebryg julebryg, Tuborg Jul-e-bryg.

  Enjoy it cold, and wish a friend Merry Christmas once again. Hey!

  Julebryg julebryg, Tuborg Jul-e-bryg.

  Waiting is never fun, J-day is a hit!

  ‘We also like to have a theme every year for the trucks,’ Jens goes on. ‘We’ve had elves, then last year it was Christmas trees, so this year we went for Top Gun.’

  I tell him that Top Gun doesn’t seem terribly Christmassy. ‘No. I’m not entirely sure why we did this. Some people in the creative team came up with it…’ He changes tack by telling me that the Carlsberg teams distribute 20,000 bracelets and 45,000 synthetic Santa hats on J-Day as well. These are worn with pride for the remainder of the evening by the assembled hordes, including, one year, by unlikely J-Day reveller Salman Rushdie.

  Having fled his home to go into hiding, and with a fatwa issued against him, The Satanic Verses author was spotted in a bar in Frederiksberg on J-Day of 1996 wearing a blue and white Tuborg Santa hat. He was papped with a smile on his face and a julebryg in front of him, making front-page news around the world the next day. ‘We’re not sure his security team were very pleased,’ Jens confides in me, ‘but it was great for us!’

  I figure that if it’s good enough for the Booker of Booker winners, it’s probably good enough for Lego Man. I thank Jens for his insights before waking my husband from his liquorice-scented slumber.

  ‘Good night?’ I ask cheerily, opening the blind and letting in the gloom.

  He makes a grunting noise that neither confirms nor denies that the rest of the evening was a festive success, though from the fact that he still can’t open his eyes at 11am, I’m suspecting it was a large one. I selflessly offer to do a coffee run into town on the condition that he emerges from his pit at some point in the next few hours.

  The roads are empty. The whole of Jutland, it seems, is nursing a collective hangover. Even the bakery staff look jaded, and they’re used to getting by on a few hours’ sleep a night. One of the girl
s in my choir is a baker and having made Danish pastries my Mastermind specialist subject over the past year, I’m now well versed in how my beloved snegles are brought into this world. The magical process starts, I’ve learned, when some poor souls turn up to get the ovens going at 2am.

  Pastries and coffees in hand, I step outside to inhale the cold, thin air and dodge street-cleaning machines already at work to tidy up after last night’s revelry. The normally spotless streets are strewn with snow-flecked beer bottles, blue Santa hats and muddy tinsel. I hear a crack underfoot and peer over my vast expanse of stomach to see a pair of cracked plastic aviators in a mush of slimy bubbles and soiled foam.

  From this point onwards, Christmas is officially deemed to have begun and all shops and local radio stations are contractually obliged to play Now That’s What I Call Christmas non-stop. Disclaimer: I am a huge fan of the festive season and regularly break out ‘Fairytale of New York’ before the start of December, but the Danes embrace Christmas on a whole other level. Lego Man and I take to playing Chris Rea roulette – it being a sure-fire bet that the gravel-voiced crooner’s ‘Driving Home for Christmas’ will be playing on at least three Danish radio stations at any given minute of the day. One very special Friday, it’s playing on five of the six stations in range as I drive to the supermarket. Now that’s what I call Christmas…

  For many, Tivoli Gardens is the essence of Christmas and millions flock to Denmark’s capital at this time of year to marvel at the twinkly lights, eat traditionally shaped pretzels and pet the reindeer shipped in specially. But in rural Jutland, things are a little less fancy.

  ‘So, Santa’s coming to The Big Town tomorrow,’ Helena C tells me casually in mid-November.

  ‘Ooh, fun, where will he be?’ I am aware that as a grown-up I have no business to be quite so keen on Father Christmas, but my year of living Danishly has taught me the importance of letting go and being myself. So now, I’m an out and proud AFOC (adult fan of Christmas).

  ‘Well,’ Helena C goes on, ‘he used to come along the canal, handing out sweets from an old boat, but we had a few issues with kids surging towards open water and falling in. It wasn’t great PR for the town. Plus the water is pretty cold at this time of year. So it was agreed that Santa should probably stick to dry land this year.’ As I mentioned, health and safety: not so big in Denmark.

  This year, Santa arrives by pony, smashes some ‘slik’ (or sweets) around, then heads to the main square to turn on the lights. Danes insist on decorating their municipal trees to look a lot like gherkins. Not for them the artfully wound-around fairy lights adorning grand public trees throughout the rest of the world at Christmas. In Jutland, at least, someone goes up on a crane to the top of the tree with several strands of bulbs and drops them, vertically, creating a stripy, strangely phallic-looking centrepiece for every town in the region. I ask around as to why this is and find that the Ann Summers personal massager-style tree decoration is another case of ‘tradition’. Once the town’s tree lights have been turned on, nets of fairy lights get cast over every object that remains stationary for more than a couple of hours in Denmark. Danish homes also get zhuzhed up with an assortment of spangly things and a bewildering array of foraged finds.

  Friendly Neighbour is back from Copenhagen for the weekend and appears on our doorstep one Sunday morning with armfuls of what I can only assume is garden waste.

  ‘For you!’ she says, brightly.

  ‘Er, thanks!’ I try to reply equally brightly.

  ‘Since I’m not going to be here for Christmas I brought you a few leftovers from the forest to decorate your home.’

  ‘Wow…’ I can see lichen, something that looks a lot like a toadstool, and some twigs. ‘Thank you…’

  ‘You don’t do that, back in England? Decorate your house for Christmas with things from nature?’

  ‘Um, well…’ I don’t know quite how to break it to her that I seem to have mistaken ‘nature’ for ‘John Lewis’ up until this moment in my life. ‘I think people just tend to buy Christmas decorations back home,’ I tell her.

  ‘Well now you are in Denmark! You must use nature.’ Friendly Neighbour won’t be dissuaded so I invite her in for coffee and she gives me the skinny on decorating Danishly. ‘It is quite all right to gather from the forests, but only for your own private use, no more than you can fit in one bag. Of course, you know that there are two kinds of forests?’ I did not know this. ‘Ones owned by the Nature Agency and private forests. In Nature Agency forests you can gather from the whole forest floor. In private forests you are only allowed to take what you can reach from the trail. If you find a nice branch or piece of bark, you are allowed to pick it up, unless it is from a fir or spruce tree as these are for forest owners only. Acorn, cones and beechnuts can be gathered when found on the ground only, but mushrooms and lichen you can gather as much as you like.’

  ‘And, er, how do you decorate with mushrooms?’ I eye up the slimy thing now winking at me from my kitchen table. Friendly Neighbour looks at me as if I’m simple. Again.

  ‘In bouquets, of course!’

  ‘Of course…’

  As well as fungus, Friendly Neighbour has very kindly lent us one of her ‘nisser’ – a statuette of an alarming goblin-like creature. Folklore has it that nisser were responsible for determining how fruitful a farmer’s harvest would be in days gone by. If a family kept its nisse (singular) happy and well stocked with rice porridge (evil spirits had simple tastes in yesteryear’s Scandinavia), then the goblin would make sure things went well. Like a sort of lower-stakes miniature Mafioso. The idea now is that they’re spies for Santa, reporting back on any bad behaviour. But for the most part they just look creepy.

  ‘It really does feel like he’s watching you,’ I remark to Lego Man once Friendly Neighbour’s gone. The strange, mute, hunched figure appears to be staring into my very soul, no matter where I try to hide him.

  ‘I know – some joker left one in the office loo the other day,’ Lego Man tells me with a shudder. ‘It was horrible. No one could relax enough to … you know.’

  Office high jinks reach a new zenith this month as Danes start winding down for the holidays and, more importantly, planning their julefrokost. This is the annual Christmas lunch that’s been held in most workplaces since the 1940s. My cultural integration coach Pernille Chaggar has warned me that Christmas lunches in Denmark can be, ‘six, eight, even ten hours long.’

  ‘There’s an art to controlling yourself so that you can eat to the very end and sample each new dish that comes to the table,’ she explains. These, apparently, include pickled herring, pork, beer and schnapps. It sounds like an antacid advert waiting to happen. ‘A lot of alcohol is usually consumed,’ Pernille admits, ‘and people traditionally let their hair down and suspend some of the everyday boundaries, both in relation to the social hierarchy and generally accepted social conventions.’ This is something I’m now familiar with, having observed the ‘controlled loss of control’ approach to Danish drinking on numerous occasions since ‘Christmas’ kicked off.

  As partners aren’t usually invited to witness the debauchery of the office lunch in Denmark, I’d expected to experience julefrokost vicariously through Lego Man’s reports and those of other friends. So I’m touched when an invitation arrives to go to one myself as a lowly freelancer – and consider it my Bruce Parry-esque duty to accept.

  I push open the doors of the old town hall to reveal a vast, grand, banqueting room crammed with tables and around 200 revellers already in full swing. I’m pretty sure my party isn’t this large and wander around aimlessly trying to find someone who looks like they might be in charge. Music blasts, lights dazzle, and Vikings maraud, helping themselves to wine and food from a table laid out like some kind of Bacchanalian feast. I feel a little like I’m in a Baz Luhrmann film and am grateful when a familiar face smiles at me. The woman who invited me scoops me up and takes me to a table populated by people I partially recognise. They all exclaim in horror
about how huge I am now and one observes that I look like ‘overstuffed ravioli’. Danes are nothing if not blunt. It’s also fair to say that my julefrokost crew are already well lubricated and appear far more excited to see me than folk I’ve only met a few times have any right to be.

  ‘You’re heeeerrreeeeee! Now we can begin!’

  As Pernille predicted, herring is first up – big bowls of the stuff in various ‘flavours’ from curry to cinnamon. It takes a brave seasoning to take on the heft of a pickled herring and the result is something of an oral assault, not for the delicate of stomach. The fish is eaten on rye bread and washed down with a shot of schnapps.

  ‘To help the herring swim!’ they tell me as they drink. The tiny glasses are refilled for another toast and soon, every other bite is accompanied by a ‘skål!’ (‘cheers’) Next is a buffet of meat and fish, much of it of unidentifiable origin. I watch my fellow diners ladle a creamy sauce with cubes of something in it over sausages and pork, before discovering that the chunks are chicken.

  ‘It’s a chicken sauce on pork?’

  ‘Yes,’ the girl to the right of me nods, smiling. ‘You like it?’

  I can’t deny that it’s tasty, but even a committed carnivore can have too much of a good thing.

  Dessert is risalamande, a form of rice pudding mixed with whipped cream and chopped almonds with a whole almond hidden somewhere in the dish. The lucky reveller who finds the whole almond wins a prize, but has to conceal their discovery as long as possible by secreting said nut in their cheek. This is so that the rest of the party is forced to gobble down the entire vat of the creamy, lumpy dessert smothered in cherry sauce before the big reveal. By serving number two I’m ready for a lie down, but the rest of my group is just getting started. At the table next to us, a spirited game of pakkeleg starts up – an aggressive form of pass the parcel where, as far as I can make out, everyone brings a small wrapped gift and then throws a dice for the chance to steal other people’s presents before stockpiling as many as possible for themselves.