I've been so busy with Christmas and work and other things since end of November that I'm only posting stuff now. Sorry about that - God jul. Please note that I have already consumed several rum-laced egg-nogs in your honor, whomever you are, dear reader. It really has been a very full and fun December!
above is one of the nisser (elves) at Tivoli where we visited for julemarked 'round Christmas Eve - very festive!
Other fun things during the season:
Malcolm's annual St. Lucia Fest school concert - I will post some video+audio of the singing once I get it up on google video. Very cute, as last year. Malcolm gets stage fright in public although he sings readily enough in private and their practices. Poor Alberte, below, was petrified and cried for a good part of it - but she recovered about halfway through :).
western-themed office christmas party: wherein two friends and I went as the three amigos or stoned mexicans. Suffice to say that we employed the method acting technique and stayed in character the entire evening. Sadly I don't have pictures of that yet.
- The kids christmas party at Microsoft Vedbæk where I work: As last year it was good fun. Julemænd (santa claus) gave out gifts to the the kids (Malcolm got a Hot Hits or some other CD which included The Crazy Frog song much to his delight). We had the return of the balloon man-fire eater-unicyclist again which the kids just love as you can see from their faces below
- julefrokost and fetching a juletræ with our danish friends: Jesper, Nelda and family graciously included us in their traditional felling/fetching of the christmas tree, followed by a lovely traditional danish dinner. It was great fun traipsing around the treefarm trying to find the perfect tree, but they finally got one!
and lastly we had a lovely christmas eve dinner (peking duck, probably the only caucasians in DK eating that on christmas) and a nice christmas morning opening presents
Malcolm received a nice assortment of (parent approved (tm)) Lego toys including the Mindstorms robot shown here - a gift for both he and Susan who wants to program it! I think the product motto is directly aimed at young boys in a sweet and anachronistic (think Tom Swift) way: 'Build and program robots that do what you want!'
I received a Celestron SkyScout 'personal planetarium' / star finder which I'm really excited to try. We're off to Iceland for New Year's in a few days (more on that in a later post) so I'm hoping to see Aurora Borealis while we're there and maybe point the skyscout at it and see what it says :).
Oh and I accepted a job with a new team at MS to begin next year so as you can see it was a very full and eventful month :).
This is our last Christmas here in DK as we're returning to Seattle later next year, probably mid- to late-summer, so I'm glad we've partaken in so many seasonal things this year. The danes make a great go of the winter solstice and christmas, and it makes the short, dark days much more cheery and bearable.