What's a Christmas without Explosions?

On a date chosen by the first pope to keep the pagan holy days more or less intact, a little baby Jesus was born in the Christian quarter of old Jeruselum (although it may not have been Christian then) and received gifts from Sinterklaas, St Nick and Odin. Meanwhile a Yule Nisse is in the rafters eating rice porridge with a pat of butter on top. Or something like that. Without CocaCola and Canadian Tire to straighten things out for me, it has become rather confusing.

I know I was feeling a bit sorry for myself after 6 weeks of dark, dreary clouds and rain,  but Christmas morning started out with a light snow and then sunshine. We actually ended up with a white Christmas! The traditional Danish Christmas consists of the main Christmas meal on the 24th eve, kids open presents and then on Christmas day is a 5 hour Christmas "lunch". We keep the English tradition of opening presents on Christmas morning and we had the official meal and lunch days before Christmas so we had a day free to take a long walk.

Long walks are what we do over here.  Walks in the forest, along the coast and in the streets of Copenhagen. Without snow, you don't get the winter activities but you can always go for a walk. 

Hike along the snowy north coast

In the forest with some gnarly trees

Horsholm Kirke on a bright sunny day

Copenhagen from the Round Tower observation deck

Kids on the Round Tower

New Year's Eve draws a comparison mainly to the second Desert Storm, Mother of all Privately conducted Explosive Fireworks Festivals. Every man, woman and child over 5 is expected to let off 50 kg of fireworks. Special markets and tents are set up around the countryside to sell fireworks and every grocery store, corner store, cigar store and hardware store stocks up to sell fireworks. For days before and days after NYE, it sounds like a small arms market in Peshawar with all the gunfire and rockets firing off. Midnight on NYE the horizon over our town looked like the battle of Vimy Ridge. I think there is still some war refugees from the Gaza Strip hiding in their basement down the street from us. Emergency rooms get eyeballs and fingers damaged and this year 3 people were killed by some illegal professional fireworks that were ignited by prima cord instead of fuses (0.5 seconds is not long enough to run away).

Our neighbor was igniting fireworks on the street in front of our house a few days before NYE and we, of course, went out to watch. A cluster of small vertical fireworks blew out horizontally and came right up the road towards us exploding in the hedges all around. I grabbed Maja and carried her into our gate while Tom, who had been hiding behind a fence, hunkered down with beautiful purple starbursts exploding 2 meters away! A lot of excitement for our sleepy little street. Who would have thought that an $8 firework assembled by 8 year old kids in an 800 year old factory in China wouldn't have ISO 5001 standards? What?


So with Christmas and New Years over, what is on the horizon? Besides wind, rain and cloud, we have some hockey, we're moving Mette's mom into a Nursing home and we have a trip planned with the Stanley's to Italy in late March. I thought it might be wise to leave town before the Danes celebrate Easter.