God Jul (Merry Christmas!)

I celebrated Christmas with Alexander's close family. His mom is a translator and loves to read, so there were little nooks like this one half way up the steps all over the house, filled with books in both English and Danish.
Many of the Danish Christmas traditions seemed quaint and old fashioned to me. There were people on many busy street corners selling trees, and it was not uncommon to see people hiking home with their new bit of holiday spirit over their shoulder.
The day before Christmas eve, we went out and bought a tree. It was the last tree the seller on the corner had, so we settled, despite it's "enormous size." It seemed like a pretty normal sized tree to me, until we had to carry it home!

We were all the way back to the front door when we realized we'd forgotten to have the seller nail a wooden cross to the bottom of the tree. They take trees down within a few days in Denmark, so they don't usually bother to water them. Instead, we borrowed a stand from the neighbors that was much too narrow for our large tree. Alexander and I spent a couple hours sawing off the bottom 8 inches of the trunk and then using that as a mallet and an axe as a chisel to taper down the rest. We then went around it several times with clippers and thinned it out- there was no room for decorations!
The decorations Alexander's family uses are fairly similar to home. They use a mix of store bought glass ornaments, things people have made throughout the year, and a few ornaments from "here and there" over the years. We pulled out paper Santas from a couple generations, and a couple times Alexander's mom would say "ah! Those were my mothers."

There were a few differences, however. Danish ornaments are often red and white, for the national colors; they dress their trees like their flags. They used candles, not lights, on the tree. They also often put tiny baskets filled with cookies or nuts on the tree, and cut out magazines or red and white paper to make little heart baskets according to the instructions here.
Christmas eve is the biggest day of celebration in Denmark, at least in the family I stayed with. We had a big dinner, lit candles on our newly decorated tree, sang carols in Danish (the language completely escapes me, but I got the "hallelujah" part!) and exchanged presents.
This is the song book I could only follow along in. I had to count syllables and listen for line pauses quite a bit.
We spent the rest of the evening playing a trivia game that Alexander's mom translated into English for my benefit. Occasionally, we looked questions up in enormous atlases for curiosity's sake.