What the Danes get wrong about Christmas
Danish politicians spend a lot of time encouraging, and sometimes shaming, immigrants like me into assimilating. In my experience their rhetoric is redundant: most immigrants to Denmark do their best to adopt Danish customs, values and traditions, to fit in and not scare the locals. But there is one time of year when this can be tricky: Christmas.
This is nothing whatsoever to do with the way the Danes celebrate the birth of Christ, I hasten to add. I love pretty much all of their traditions: risalamande (rice pudding) with hot cherry sauce, singing round the tree, making the Englishman do the washing up (that is a Danish thing, right?). I have gone on record many times anointing the Danes as the ‘World Champions of Christmas’.
Apart from getting the date wrong*, the Danes have elevated Christmas to an art form.
Why is this? One of the reasons is that, unlike, say, snowy Sweden and Norway, there really is nothing happening outdoors in Denmark at this time of year. The weather is miserable to an almost comical degree, and the topography so defiantly uninteresting, that the Danes have no choice but to retreat indoors. Which is probably also why they spend more on their sofas than most other nationalities spend on their cars.
Best of all about the Danish Christmas, aside from the relatively brief afternoon trip to church (speaking as someone raised a Catholic, I really appreciate the brevity of the Danish church service), there is almost no religious aspect to the festivities. A Danish Christmas is above all a celebration of home and family.
Another notable aspect of a Danish Christmas is how child un-friendly it is - almost to a sadistic degree. The Anglo world has infantilised Christmas, but there is something quite delightful about the way the Danes make the poor little blighters wait until very late at night - after church, and singing, and a three course meal, more singing round the tree, and so on - before allowing them to open their presents, is the kind of masterstroke Chinese re-education camp torturers would envy. Who said Christmas was for kids anyway?
You’re waiting for the ‘but’. My ‘but’ is personal, but I suspect applies universally to immigrants, because however much we attempt to assimilate there will always be something we miss about our homeland at this time of year.
I call this Emigré Syndrome. Psychiatrists* define Emigré Syndrome as ‘an indulgently melancholy mood of rose-tinted nostalgia, generally experienced by migrants with pretensions’. It manifests during rare moments of wistful remembrance of one’s homeland, and its pull is strongest at this time of year.
This is not merely a question of missing family or friends ‘back home’. That’s a given. No, Emigré Syndrome is different. Emigré Syndrome is a yearning, tied to specific locations, rituals or traditions - even quotidian objects like post boxes or dry stone walls can provoke it, although they must be things whose memory prompts a fond psychic yearning, a plaintive ache.
Emigré Syndrome is more potent during the winter months, I think, partly because there are fewer distractions. And then of course you also have the messy emotional-nostalgic vortex that is Christmas.
I experience Emigré Syndrome, for instance, when I think of the winter landscape where I grew up in Sussex, southern England: the rolling hills crystallised in a bright morning frost, or of the local pub rammed to its low-beamed ceiling on New Year’s eve, or, quite ridiculously for an atheist republican like me, carols in an English country church followed by the Queen’s Speech and a glass of champagne.
For my Haitian friend, Gerry, Emigré Syndrome manifests as a nostalgia for ‘Joumou’, a thick, spicy pumpkin soup with beef and vegetables which they serve there on New Years day - a tradition dating back to Haiti’s independence from the French in 1804 (actually, according to Gerry, not so much a tradition as a ‘fuck you’, as the soup was forbidden to the slave population up until their revolution). For Michael, a chef of my acquaintance, originally from Rhodes, it’s ‘Kalanda’, the songs Greek children sing on Christmas Eve in return for sweets and treats. Anja from the Russian diaspora in Copenhagen recently spent a good 15 minutes rhapsodising to me about the ice rinks in Moscow, which are apparently gigantic; that, and “sliding down slopes using random objects” (there aren’t really any slopes in Denmark worth sliding down, she added mournfully). New Yorker Sue, meanwhile, yearns for the lights on Fifth Avenue and the window display at Saks. For Englishman Chris, it’s “Twiglets, mince pies and my mother’s endless batches of cheese straws which I will make to placate my homesick heart”. Rhea, a self-described ‘non-religious Jewish New Yorker’ misses the Christmas day meal in Chinatown - a tradition among NYC Jews apparently. And my Antipodean friend Jeni dreams of fruit: “Oh my god, mangoes ripened in the sun, to me they are the taste of Australian summer”.
Perhaps if I lived in Australia my winter homesickness pangs wouldn’t quite be so pronounced. Winter is summer there of course, so one mightn’t be so keenly aware of the corresponding seasons back home. Instead, I find myself in a country which, superficially at least, bares fair comparisons with England. There are churches and Christmas trees and carols here in Denmark too of course, but the churches are rather austere, the Christmas trees more tastefully decorated, and the carols are unrecognisable. Frankly, it can all get a bit unsettling, if you let it. And I do. In fact, sometimes I welcome it, wallow in it, and I still don’t really know why.
After all, I’m glad to live in Denmark. In many ways it’s better than England. And of course I have a choice. I’m not an exile, I’m not Joyce in Trieste, or Zweig in Rio. Not to mention that, in an hour and a half, and for a hundred quid, I could catch a plane and enjoy all the frosty hills and crowded pubs I want. But I choose not to.
Instead, as I celebrate Christmas in my highly habitable foreign field, I will still probably allow myself a moment of self-indulgent melancholy for mince pies, cheap Christmas crackers and ‘The Morecambe and Wise Show’ on TV. Perhaps I’ll shed a tear as I listen to Laura Marling sing:
“I will come back here, bring me back when I'm old
I want to lay here forever in the cold
I might be cold but I'm just skin and bones
And I'll never love England more than when covered in snow.”
And then I’ll help myself to a third helping of risalamande.
*Sorry, but the Baby Jesus was born on the 25th. That’s his birthday. That’s what we are supposed to be celebrating.
** Amateur psychiatrists, that is.
END