The Year of Living Danishly

by Helen Russell

  Wine flows, faces become flushed and lips, blackened with Beaujolais, move animatedly. A few hands seem to be resting in places that perhaps they shouldn’t – notably the thighs and bottoms of colleagues they’ll presumably have to face on Monday morning in the cold semi-light of day. By the time coffee is served, several couples are sucking each other’s faces like teenagers, up against walls or still in the seats that they plonked themselves into, several hours before.

  ‘So, what happens next?’ I ask the girl next to me.

  ‘You mean them?’ she looks at face-sucking couple #1. ‘I imagine they’ll have sex. There are hotel rooms just upstairs,’ she point directly above our heads.

  ‘Oh, no,’ I thank her for her candidness but explain, ‘I meant more along the lines of how this group plan to spend the rest of the evening…’

  ‘Oh, that. Well, there’ll be dancing, probably. And then who knows?’

  At this point, my heavily pregnant Bruce Parry pioneering spirit starts to desert me and I say goodbye to my table-neighbours before attempting to slip away quietly. This doesn’t go so well. In my enlarged state, personal space is compromised and on my way out I have to edge past various couplings. Thinking that I am exempt from this orgiastic annual ritual on account of being a) happily married, b) sober and c) up the duff, I exchange a few pleasantries with a fifty-something man while I wait to pick up my coat (aka Lego Man’s oversized parka). I’m just re-robing and preparing to leave when he propositions me.

  ‘What?’ is all I can splutter in response. Then, pointing at my stomach: ‘Really?!’

  He gives a ‘can’t blame a chap for trying’ shrug before adding: ‘You know what they say – “pregnant, can’t get pregnant”!’

  I decline, fervently, and squeeze past more middle managers making out in stairwells before making a break for it and driving home.

  The next day, we go for brunch with The Viking, Helena C and some other Danish friends and have a ‘julefrokost horror story amnesty’ where everyone hands in their weapons of mass humiliation.

  ‘There are a lot of hookups,’ admits Helena C. ‘It doesn’t matter if you’re married or not.’

  Another girl tells us about a Christmas party fling she had some years back that made things decidedly awkward around the photocopier come January. And a third reveals how he and his team were forced to learn the dance from South Korean pop icon Psy’s hit, ‘Gangnam Style’, and then perform it to senior management.

  ‘It was weird,’ he admits, still looking a little shaken. ‘Then afterwards, we all watched some porn,’ he adds as a throwaway remark before taking a swig from his bottle of julebryg.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘What?’ He looks up. ‘The bit about the dancing?’

  ‘No!’ the party cry in unison.

  ‘The porn!’ I say, far louder than was necessary and attracting the attention of the table next to us. ‘Sorry,’ I murmur.

  ‘Oh,’ he says, ‘that. Well…’ he sets down his beer and starts, matter of factly: ‘The dance teacher had left, the financial director had finished pretending to ride me like a pony, and we started watching this movie, projected onto a whiteboard in this hotel conference room at 4pm in the afternoon. Then this man appeared on screen who looked a lot like Jens in our team—’

  Lego Man shoots me a look that says, ‘see, I told you a lot of people were called Jens in Denmark’. I give him a look in return that says, ‘not now – we’re about to hear a story about porn at an office Christmas party. This outranks Lars–Mette–Jens-gate’. Marital telepathy is a wonderful thing.

  ‘So anyway, we’re all watching the guy who looks like Jens and thinking, “this is kind of weird”,’ The Viking’s friend goes on, ‘and then the guy in the film suddenly strips. He’s totally naked, and then he starts getting it on with someone. And the real Jens sitting next to us bursts out laughing, saying, “Don’t you recognise me?” Turned out it didn’t just look like Jens, it was Jens. He’d had a career in porn before retraining in accountancy. He found the whole thing really funny, but I haven’t been able to look at him the same way since…’

  There’s a lull in conversation after this. Turns out it’s pretty hard to top a communal-screening-of-a-colleague-having-penetrative-sex story.

  By the time Lego Man’s julefrokost comes around, he’s a little afraid of what the night might entail. So I’m relieved when he makes it home, apparently unscathed.

  ‘Well, how was it? Any porn? Promiscuity? Herring fights?’

  ‘Nothing remotely porny,’ he says, sounding a little short-changed. ‘Turns out I work with a wholesome bunch. We started off with a Top Gun quiz—’

  ‘—What? Why? What is it about this country and Tom Cruise?’

  ‘—which naturally I aced,’ he goes on.

  A whole quiz on his specialist subject? Christmas really has come early for Lego Man.

  ‘And then we sang a song about Volvos,’ he adds, just casually, as he drops his bag on the bed and walks to the bathroom, slotting the head on our electric toothbrush.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I set down the book I’ve been reading and follow him in there, ‘I thought you just told me you and your high-powered colleagues spent the evening singing songs about Swedish family saloon cars…?’

  ‘That’s right,’ he says. ‘But not just any Volvo,’ he has to raise his voice now to be heard over the whir of the toothbrush. ‘The Volvo B18–210,’ he tells me, through a mouthful of minty foam. ‘There’s even a song sheet, see?’

  Dripping minty spittle all over our wooden floors, he walks back into the bedroom and fishes a stapled pamphlet of papers out of his work bag. I love that he has saved this for me. I love that he knows how happy this kind of thing makes me.

  ‘Wow,’ I exclaim, wide-eyed, as I flick through and see that other sing-songs for the night included Cat Stevens’s ‘Wild World’ and the Ace of Base classic, ‘All That She Wants’. ‘And why,’ I ask, ‘were you singing songs about Volvos?’

  ‘Apparently it’s—’

  ‘—“Tradition”?’

  ‘Exactly. Everyone else knew the words already,’ he nods at the lyric sheet. ‘It was in Danish but Lars helped me out with the lyrics – they were things like “it’s got teak interiors” and “a great undercarriage”, and “we’ll be together from now until eternity … I love my Volvo”.’

  ‘How festive…’ I shake my head in wonder. Every time I think I’ve got this country sussed, it throws me a curveball.

  ‘Yeah,’ Lego Man spits into the bathroom sink and sticks his head under the tap to rinse his mouth. ‘It’s all a bit of a blur after that … in fact, I might need to go and have a lie down…’

  After all this partying, it would be easy to lose sight of the true meaning of Christmas: the obligation to cook a meal no one chooses to eat at any other time of year and spend days cooped up inside with people you haven’t seen for the last twelve months. The Danes have a saying: ‘guests are like fish – after three days they start to smell’, and yet somehow we’ve signed up to have house guests for seven whole days over Christmas. I’m very fond of my in-laws. They are lovely people. But a week-long visit while I’m nine months pregnant is a little more than I’d bargained for. At least, I tell myself, there’ll be plenty going on in The Big Town, what with Danes being so crazy about Christmas and all.

  ‘Oh grasshopper, how much you still have to learn!’ American Mom shakes her head when I tell her my action plan. ‘Sure, there’s a whole bunch of parties in the run up to Christmas, but in the week itself, no one does anything. It’s all about spending time with the family.’

  This is a setback. Then a bright idea strikes me: Perhaps we could combine our various families in some sort of expat jamboree!

  ‘So, er,’ I ask, ‘what are you and the kids doing for Christmas?’

  American Mom gives me a ‘well, duh!’ look: ‘We’re going back to the States, of course!’

  ‘Oh. Right then. Well, enjoy.’

&nb
sp; ‘We will! Good luck!’

  American Mom wasn’t exaggerating. During the Christmas week in Jutland, everything is closed. And I mean EVERYTHING. I look on the kommune website’s calendar to see if there might be a few rogue activities or events still taking place but see only a row of blank squares. I scroll through the days. Nothing, nothing, and then, just as those wise men must have felt on noticing something twinkly up there on the horizon, I spot a star on the calendar.

  ‘Look, dog: an event!’ I click on the starred day, eager with anticipation, only to find that the only fixture occurring over the next seven days in Jutland is my own choir’s Christmas concert. Something I’m scheduled to be at anyway. Singing songs in a language I still don’t understand and attempting to channel my inner gospel diva despite being both sober and, more crucially, British. ‘Excellent, dog: we have one afternoon’s entertainment.’ The dog growls. ‘And yes, I use “entertainment” in the loosest sense of the word.’ This just leaves six days to fill. Our longest staying visitors to date were here for four days back in the summer, when Sticksville-on-Sea was ‘open’, and we still struggled to entertain them after day three.

  ‘Don’t Danes mind having nothing to do for a whole week and just hanging out with their family?’ I ask Helena C between songs at our final choir rehearsal before Christmas. She admits to me in hushed tones that yes, her own relatives can get a bit much, but says that most Danes love it.

  ‘They ran this survey in 1998 and it showed that spending time with the family over Christmas was important to 78 per cent of Danes,’ she tells me, as though this proves it. I point out that there weren’t smartphones, or iPads, or Netflix back in 1998. ‘Hanging out with the family or watching Friends on terrestrial TV was about all there was to do back in those days…’

  ‘This is true,’ she concedes. ‘Maybe that’s why they haven’t run a survey since. Oh well, good luck!’

  Jeez, why does everyone keep wishing me luck?

  ‘Thanks,’ I tell her. ‘It’s beginning to sound like I might need it…’

  The choir concert passes off without a hitch. I sing with the Danish lyrics written out phonetically and Sellotaped to a soprano in front of me. At the end I’m congratulated on my Danish by the choir mistress (‘not bad, for a foreigner’) and my in-laws, unaware of the scribbled notes strapped to the back of my choral colleague.

  ‘Thanks,’ I nod, graciously. Helena C tries not to smirk and promises to keep my secret safe ‘for now’.

  Afterwards, we all share æbleskiver, a traditional spherical pancake of pure deliciousness served with jam and icing sugar. There is a lot of hugging and wishing each other ‘God Jul!’ – happy Christmas – before we all go our separate ways. Me, waddling back to the car I now barely fit into (the driving seat being so far back to accommodate my bump that my feet only just reach the pedals) and heading home to stare into the abyss of six days of nothingness.

  We’ve resolved to do Christmas as Danishly as possible and so I’ve taken counsel from all the Danes I know to compile a foolproof recipe plan for the big day. On the menu: duck with prunes, caramelised potatoes, boiled potatoes (because Danes can never have enough potatoes in any given mealtime) and red cabbage followed by risalamande. Helena C has offered to be on call at the end of the phone should any calamities arise, and so it begins. Danes celebrate with a traditional roast dinner on Christmas Eve, so my 24th December goes something like this:

  7am: Wake up, try to let dog out quietly to avoid waking guests. Fail, so make them tea.

  9am: Start peeling things. Stare at the duck currently taking up most of fridge. Try to dissuade dog from barking at duck by distracting with bone. Do something unspeakable with giblets. Feel a bit queasy.

  11am: Make rice pudding to allow time for it to set and chill in fridge. Try to get over idea of a dessert that has same consistency as sick and forget about traumatic experiences with school lunches and the word ‘coagulate’. Whip cream with handheld blender. Send cream up walls, down front, and over dog. Put dog outside to clean off in the snow. Melt more sugar for cherry sauce. Blanch almonds and chop up, then stir in to lumpy goo with more sugar and more cream.

  1pm: Eat a light lunch of pickled herring on rye bread. House now smells of cream, melted sugar, fish and flatulence.

  2pm: Finish off a feature for UK newspaper where Christmas Eve is still a legitimate working day. Check email and find one from a PR inviting me to a ‘One-day Festive Resilience Workshop’ and another entitled ‘Coping Techniques for Christmas Stress’. Wonder how much they know…

  4.30pm: Boil potatoes. Put duck in oven. Battle with six pans and a temperamental oven crammed with baking trays while perspiring in just a stretched T-shirt and shorts now, despite snow outside. Decide Danish homes may be too well insulated.

  5pm: Go to mass at local church to experience ‘traditional’ Christmas service. Only it’s long, all in Danish, and I have a duck in the oven. Realise haven’t thought this one through. Keep eye on watch as elderly folk around me in furs begin nodding off and snoring gently. Small child in front row turns around, rolls eyes, and mimes hanging himself to express boredom. And he can understand what the priest’s banging on about…

  7pm: Waddle home. Attempt to extract bird’s fat. Make brown sauce from cream, fat and cornflour. Wonder if have ever used as much cream, butter and sugar before. Decide have not. Melt yet more sugar in frying pan, add more butter, make face as drop in half of potatoes and roll them around until resemble miniature toffee apples.

  8pm: Unscrew lid of supermarket-bought red cabbage (in Danish: ‘rød kål’, which sounds amusingly like ‘roadkill’), decant into rustic-looking dish and bury jar in bin. Mush up cabbage to pass off as homemade. Get all dishes on table, make Lego Man carve, collapse. Forget Christmas crackers, retrieve from behind sofa then wish hadn’t bothered. These fail to go ‘bang’ but include such hilarious Danish jokes as: ‘If you need to do something, do it right as the hassle is the same,’ and, ‘He who understands how to listen often sits and thinks about something else’. Oh, how we laugh!

  9pm: ‘Singing and dancing’ commences. No one is hurt, but the dog gets drenched.

  Let me explain. My Danish festive advisory committee assured me that to do things properly, we must also decorate our bushy Danish fir tree with the colours of the Danish flag – red and white – as well as the obligatory ‘nature’, fairy lights and real candles.

  ‘Then, after Christmas dinner,’ said Helena C, ‘you all dance round the tree, singing.’

  ‘Whoa there,’ I stop her. ‘Real candles? In a dried-out tree? In wood-heavy, Scandi homes?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you do that when there are children about?’

  ‘Especially then. The kids love it!’

  ‘Excited children and naked flames? What could go wrong?’

  ‘Yeah, I see what you mean,’ says Helena C. ‘I thought everyone did this until we had an Australian over for Christmas one year and he pointed out the fire hazard.’

  ‘Quite.’

  ‘But we make sure we’re safe.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Well,’ she says, ‘we always have a big bucket of water to throw over the tree in case anything happens.’ Good grief.

  ‘And you have fairy lights as well as candles? Don’t you trip over the cord?’

  She looks at me as though I’m a mal-coordinated imbecile. ‘We just … step over it…’

  ‘OK, but how do you get round the tree?’ I explain that we normally have ours in a corner. ‘That way, you only have to decorate one side of it.’

  Helena C gives me a judgey face: ‘We tend to decorate all the way around and then we just pull the tree out into the middle of the room on a mat for the singing and dancing.’

  ‘Right then.’ I can do this, I think, how hard can it be? ‘And what do you normally sing?’ I ask.

  ‘Well, there are a few Danish songs we all know that I can give you the words to,’ she goes on, ‘then my uncle alw
ays sings the first two lines of “Winter Wonderland”.’

  ‘Only the first two?’

  ‘Yes. He doesn’t know the rest.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘He could learn them. We tell him to every year. But so far, nothing.’ She shakes her head as though he is a huge disappointment as singing uncles go. ‘So anyway, you and your family should just sing whatever you like, then hold hands and dance around the tree. Easy!’

  Only it doesn’t quite turn out this way. Our vast, bushy fir looks lovely lit up by fairy lights and real candles. But there are only four of us and so reaching our arms out to hold hands around the tree proves a struggle. Flames flicker precariously close to the blinds, the sofa and Lego Man’s acrylic Christmas jumper, and twice our guests trip over the cord of the fairy lights. It turns out that none of us are much cop at remembering any festive songs in their entirety and after trip-up number three, we collapse on the sofa, laughing hysterically in a release of cooped-up festive stress. At this uncharacteristic whooping, the dog makes a break for it from his sentry post at the front door to see what all the commotion is about. In slow motion he moves from the tree, to me, then to Lego Man, checking that all is well, before spotting the ominous black bucket on hand in case of fire. This, he assesses, is new. This, he suspects, could be dangerous. With an energetic leap, he pounces on the alien object, placing his front paws on its side to get a better look inside … and tips its contents all over himself, the wooden floor and the special ‘tree mat’ purchased for the occasion. My first Danish Christmas celebrations end with a mop in hand.

  And then … calm descends. The shops are all closed as we were warned they would be, and the roads empty. Danes, it turns out, really do stay at home with their families. For a week. So we do the same. We read books, laze around, drink cups of tea and watch the snow fall outside from the warmth of the sofa. And then, when it finally settles, we go for a walk. And all is peaceful and white. It is, I have to admit, magical.

  The enforced retreat means that we talk, properly, about everything from favourite films to foreign policy. I learn that my father-in-law can, if left to his own devices, get through a pot of honey every two days and once built his own wooden cage then sat in it for twelve hours in Newcastle’s MetroCentre to protest against political prisoners for Amnesty International. I find out that my mother-in-law once created her own ice rink by flooding a car park during a particularly severe frost one year. I get to know my in-laws far better over these seven (seven!) days than I have during the years that Lego Man and I have been together. It’s like bonding bootcamp. No wonder Danish families are so close – they don’t have much choice come Christmas.