And now it is Christmas...

Today is Christmas Day. We celebrate Christmas here on the 24th. In Tom's family the day goes as follows:

9am- everyone gathers at Tom's parents & we eat breakfast together.

10/11am - We all put on our warm coats & hat & gloves & scarves & boots...pile into the cars & go to a Christmas tree farm to pick & fell a Christmas tree. This always takes a while as there is dicussions over what size, which has the best base, top, branches etc. But finally a choice is made & the men go about cutting it down while us women stand & watch & laugh & take pictures.

12/1pm - Lunch

2-5pm - Sleep, play games, Tom's dad decorates tree & places presents under

5-7pm - Prepare for dinner...take a shower, put on your finest clothes.

7-9pm - Christmas dinner of turkey, potatoes, red cabbage, caramel potatoes, beetroot, & veges. Then wash up.

9-12 - Walk around the tree singing carols, open presents, eat Christmas goodies.

Sometime between 12 & 3 - go to bed

It's beginning to smell like Christmas

This entry is a little old, but I've only just got round to finishing writing it.

Every Christmas Tom's family gathers together one day to bake. We all come & spend the day baking Christmas goodies which are then dealt out at the end of the day & we spend the next month eating!! I always make a few goodies from Australia. This year I made, white Christmas, fruit mince slice & 3 kinds of truffles (I know they're not really typical aussie).

The other main event of the day is the building of world known building out of gingerbread by the boys. This year it was the White house. After a bit of confusion in the beginning as to what the White House actually looked like (they got it muddled up with the Lincon Memorial) they set about drawing diagrams of it & making templates for all the various bits of it. Then they rolled out the dough & cut out the various bits, which were then baked

.

Afterwards came the tricky bit of constructing the house by setting all the pieces in place & joining together with icing.

Finally it was finished & the end result as I think you will agree was quite

good.

Denmark's national winter sport

I've been getting a lot of practice in recently of Denmark's national winter sport...ice skraping. There is one main risk in this sport...frost bite to fingers. That is why it is a good idea to use the protective equipment...gloves. Of course these do make the other piece of equipment required for this sport, namely the scraper, hard to hold. This means that it often flies out of your hand while trying to scrape the ice off the field...car windows. Some people employ the help medium of warm water, but you have to be careful it's not too hot otherwise you will end up with a cracked windscreen.

Julefrokost "Christmas Party"

Lit trans: Christmas lunch. However it's a bit like the wedding breakfast, it doesn't matter what time of the day it is.

Last Saturday we had our work Christmas party. It was held at one of my collegues house. They had ordered food from a catering company & the menu was as follows:

Entre:
Rugbrod & sild (rye bread & raw fish)
Tiger prawns on stick, with peach relish
Crab salad on green asparges
Russian rissoles with apple & prune kompot

Main:
Roast beef
Bagt laks med flødestuvet spinat (baked salmon with cream stewed spinach)
Æbleflæsk (not sure how to describe this, will get back to you.)

Dessert:
Rice pudding & cherry sauce
Cheese platter

Supper:
Coffee & biscuits

But instead of having just all the dishes on a table & you take a little of whatever you want, each dish came around individually & you had a small portion of it. So in actual fact we had a 10 course meal!!

Inbetween the entrees & mains we learned to dance the salsa. They had hired a teacher to come & give us a one hour lesson. It was lots of fun, but a little hard on my back. It was also fun to see Tom dancing, something I had not been able to get him to do.

We went home at 12:30am, due to the fact that I was literally falling asleep sitting in my chair!!On Monday though I heard that the others hadn't gone home until 3am.

Another interesting fact to note is that you get really dressed up. ie. formal dress. Of course my helpful husband didn't inform me of this until I got out of the shower & was in the process of getting dressed!! Hence we got there 1/2 hour late.

More snow

We've had more snow & this time it's a little more worthwhile to write about.

Still no where near a heavy snow fall, but at least you can see a bit better that it has snowed. Still hoping for a white Christmas. At the moment they say there's a 6% chance.

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas

Well, now that we are past the 26th Nov, so it is time to take out the Christmas decorations. This year Tom has decided we can buy some lights to hang on the house. So we bought 5m of isicle lights. Unfortunately this only covers the back door enterance.

In Denmark there is a tradition where starting the 1st December you begin to burn a calender candle. This is normally a tall candle that has markings on it for each day & you burn it down to that days mark. This year however they had block candles, one for each day & I decided to buy them instead.

Another tradition is that they have an advents wreth that is often made of fresh greenery & has 4 candles. You light one each Sunday for 4 sundays before Christmas. This is the first year we have had one & we made it ourselves.

They also have all these decorations made out of straw. The most common are pigs & goats. I have no idea why!