I think I will take a step back into December.  It was an eventful month.  Anne's 60th birthday, our 40th anniversary celebrated with neighbors and Nhat's pizza, Christmas, and our trip to the Canary Islands.  Seems like no right time to update the blog.  However, we were looking at photos of that time and thought we should share some of them.

Our friends on Dronning Elisabeth's Alle

Christmas is a big deal here.  Lots of Christmas parties, celebrations and 3 days, Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and second Christmas Day lunches.  One of the highlights is Tivoli.  They decorate it with a riot of lights and oldsters, kids, and families stream in every night for the 3 weeks before Christmas.  We did not ride the giant swinging chair gizmo that rises far above the park and swishes you through the cold, biting winter air, but we enjoyed other intrepid thrill-seekers winging their way high above us.   We jumped on our bikes at the last minute one night to admire the elaborate and well choreographed fireworks Tivoli fired off at 8:45 pm during the holiday season.  A cold ride back, but we ourselves were safely lit up with our glowing bike vests, blinking red flashers in back, and jittering white LEDs in the front.

We managed to keep up some of the traditions, making lefse and a braided bread ring for dinner.

A delicious dinner.  The Danes eat duck and roast pork with red cabbage and small browned potatoes for Christmas dinner with rice pudding and cherry sauce for dessert (with a hidden almond and whoever finds it gets a prize-  Anne was the winner!)

We sang songs trying to keep a semblance of a tune and danced around the tree (yes, those are live candles on the tree), as much as one can with 2 teenage boys who imagined themselves way too old for such nonsense and then opened presents with an extended family from 1 year old to 80.  We anticipated a little homesickness and certainly missed kids, grandkids, and friends, yet our Danish Skytt Andersen family kept loneliness at bay and us in the gravitational field of belonging somewhere.

The next day was clear and lovely and we walked for 4 1/2 hours around parts of Copenhagen we hadn't ever seen: houseboats tucked away in backwater canals, abandoned warehouses sporting outstanding grafitti art, artfully restored old warehouses to hip modernity on canals close to the downtown harbor, and the brand spanking new wharfside park south of Nyhavn that has- we kid you not--four trampolines set in the stone/concrete boardwalk that you can bounce along a good 25 yards just for the nonsensical heck of it.  And these 60 and nearly 60-year olds did so, even while fleeting thoughts of osteoporosis, concrete, and trampolines not mixing well ran through our minds.  

We ended up in this bar on the harbor for a reviving beer and made our way home past the lights of Christmas trees and snug, inviting neighbors' windows which we will miss.  They made the blanket of 4:00 pm darkness and evening cold that much warmer and friendlier.  Hope your holidays were good!

Copenhagen Town Hall