Merry Christmas, and Welcome to 2026!

Happy 2026 to all of our friends and family!

We have had a really nice holiday break, and we hope that you have as well. Soon, we'll be heading back to work and school, but the much-needed end-of-the-year reset has been super successful.

* * *

Our holiday season kicked off while we were still at work, of course. They spoiled us with tasty presents and that oh-so-famous Christmas party.

(I ate my treats within a couple of days - no self control. Zac's lasted much longer.)

Christmas party day in my department started with a little bit of work, but after lunch, we started in on the pre-pre-pre-party. Our department got together for julehygge - like a cozy Christmas gathering - where we decorated our department Christmas tree and made paper crafts while we ate æbleskiver, drank gløgg, and listened to Christmas music.

There are a few standard things people make out of paper each year to decorate - paper stars, paper hearts, paper chains, and paper cones. The paper stars (see my in-progress star above) are a little tricky, but they're made by folding four strips of paper around each other in a specific way. You just set them around decoratively. We have several that we put on our tree at home. The paper hearts are said to have been created first by H.C. Andersen and they are made by weaving two colors of paper together in a heart shape. A little handle is added at the end so you can hang them around. The paper chains are self-explanatory, and the paper cones are mostly made by children. They hang them on the Christmas tree and hope the nisse will leave treats in them. Can you find all four on our department tree below? (The paper chain is a little tricky, but you can see two links at least.)

After the pre-pre-pre-party came the pre-pre-party, where we put the paper crafts away and brought out the alcohol. Still in our own department groups, we chatted and drank beer and sang Christmas songs and snacked on popcorn and got dressed for the big party. We all head over together for the pre-party at the canteen, where all the departments mingle. Some people play games, some people dance (there's a DJ), and some people just drink as much free beer and wine as they can at the bar. My department has a "gin guy," so I helped him take care of the bottle.

The busses started loading up after about an hour, and we filed out onto very nice coaches. Zac and I didn't end up on the same bus, but I think at this point, we are both capable of being independent at work functions (even though we still think it's fun to hang out with each other). We sang popular music hits and drank our leftover drinks from the pre-party and chatted with our seat buddies.

Once we arrived in Copenhagen at the event center, we checked our coats. They handed us glasses of champagne while we waited, and then we found our tables for dinner. (Departments are seated together.) We were served four courses with white wine and red wine that kept refilling themselves magically. There was music and dancing, a stand-up comedian, an improv-rapper, a cozy lounge, a photo booth, and of course, lots of free beer and wine. Danish drinking culture is famously out of control.

Dancing was a lot of fun. At one point, I was thrown around the dance floor by one of my more powerful colleagues. It was super fun, but he really had us taking up more than our fair share of the dance floor. One of my colleagues tried to dance with Zac, but he's not THAT comfortable socializing yet, so he escaped. I practiced my Danish with Zac's colleagues and I taught a manager how to pull a bunny out of a napkin, a classy magic trick I learned on "Lambchop's Play-Along" as a kid. Unfortunately, she pulled out Yoda instead, but it was still fun.

Zac and I headed back to Helsingør on the train and then walked home from the station. We were tired, but it was a fun night.

* * *

Christmas time came to Helsingør, too. They decorated the streets with lights and little trees all through the historic part of town and it was really fun to walk through and see groups of people singing or playing instruments for the community. The whole town comes out to see Santa arrive on a boat from the North Pole. He sails into the harbor and disembarks, after which he climbs into a horse-drawn cart. The nisse band plays music and parades through the streets with Santa behind them, and the horses deliver him to the town square, where he goes up in a firetruck lift to magically light the giant Christmas tree.

It was our first year as part of this local tradition, and I didn't get great photos. People kept jumping in front of me, so you get what you get.

Santa tried a few times to light the tree, but something went wrong, so once the topper finally erupted in beautiful sparklers, Santa got down and the nisse band escorted him back to the harbor as he tossed candy to all the kids. (The kids just kind of all took off running after the Santa parade and as parents, we all just sat around in the square chatting and hoping our kids would come back to us at some point.)

On the Helsingør Facebook page, there were lots of requests for a julemand. I probably mentioned it before, but in Denmark, Santa doesn't come to visit kids as they sleep to leave their presents under the tree. He comes to your house for a quick pop-in to drop off a small gift after dinnertime, and Santa (or julemanden) is sometimes just a stranger you solicited off Facebook to dress up and take the presents you bought inside to your kids. It's a nice system.

Another cool thing they did in Helsingør was a Christmas window display advent calendar! One of the people who lives in the historical part of town went around to all the houses in the area and asked for 24 volunteers to make a special Christmas display in one window of their home. Each participating house was assigned a night in December counting down until Christmas, and then the list of which address to meet at on each day was posted on Facebook. At a specific time of the evening, people could gather outside the day's address and wait for the display to be turned on. Some people got really into it! One house turned on the display, but the window above it was a man in a Santa hat and Christmas sweater playing Christmas songs on the saxophone. Another night, a basket with Christmas treats was lowered down to the people in the street who came to see the window. It was such a cool idea, and a really nice way to build community.

* * *

We wanted to be all-in on the Christmas spirit and activities once December hit, but life doesn't stop and we had a lot of other things to take care of as well. The kids had doctor's appointments and physical therapy. Zac was sick. I was sick. I had a prolapsed disk in my back and couldn't move. The cat got worms and then threw them up and then Han at the vomit and I had to find a vet and get them both there with a bad back. Just stuff like that. And look! Harrison got glasses!

I mean, of course we were hoping it wouldn't come to that for him, but it did and he's making it work.

Animals are gross.

The lead-in time to Christmas was super busy, despite our desire to just relax, but we found time for fun things, too. Michele came to Denmark for work, so I took her to Friday bar (a cozy Danish experience) and had her over to our new home for dinner one evening, then the next day, we went into Copenhagen to meet up with Dorte and go to Christmas markets. It was so much fun to catch up with Michele, and we had a nice time in the city.

We had to find a new place to get our Christmas tree this year since we live farther away from the lovely farm we found our first year here. Fortunately, there was one right up the road. They lined all the turns with a fire inside an old stump, so it was easy to find our way back to the farm, and there were cute lights and activities for the kids in the barn. We were a little uncertain how to proceed since no one came out to greet us, so we went into the building full of Christmas decorations and treats to order hot chocolate and coffee. The coffee was definitely not warm, but we tried not to take it as a bad sign. We still couldn't figure out who to talk to, so I went back in and asked. A nice younger person came out and explained our options in English, so we picked out a saw and trekked off into the darkness. It was foggy and a little wet, and in hindsight, we probably should've brought headlamps or something, but we managed with just our cellphone flashlights and found a really nice tree. Zac cut it down and Kaden carried it back to the farmhouse.

It smelled lovely and was nice and straight. We got it set up in no time. It would've been nice to put it in front of the front living room window, but that's where our couch is, and we really couldn't see another place to move the couch if the tree took its spot. We ended up putting it between the living room and dining room. It was still visible from certain angles out on the sidewalk, and even though it blocked the bottom half of the bookshelf, it was a pretty good location.

Everyone helped decorate, and just like that, our house was full of Christmas hygge.

* * *

I'm sure I made it sound like we had a casual visit with an old friend followed by some sweet family time, but in the midst of all this, I was also frantically preparing for my oral danish language exam. I drove Kaden to baseball practice and just sat in the car reciting my presentation over and over, trying to guess which questions they would ask me about my topic ("Klimaforændringer og klimaløsninger med fokus på forebyggelse," or "Climate change and climate solutions with focus on prevention"). I tried to guess what my surprise topic of discussion would be and look up relevant vocabulary words. It was a stressful time.

On the day of my exam, I went to work for some reason, and then I left early to make my appointment time. Unlike the reading and writing exam, this one was held at my language school. I did SUCH a good job delivering my two-minute presentation and responding to the questions. I could feel it. I totally killed it, and I knew my preparation had paid off. Then came the surprise topic, and I admit that I could've studied for that one a little more. I gave myself a lot of slack though, because even if I had completely failed the oral exam, I'd get my PD3 certification, and that's all I really needed. Anyway, I could feel myself slipping up and failing to understand the core of the questions being asked of me about social media and news headlines and stuff. No matter. I got a 7, which was the highest score I thought I might get (see my previous post for a description of the scores - the Danish grading system is a little weird when you only have the U.S. grading system as a reference). I thanked the proctors and peaced out of that language school forever.

Well, not forever. There was a graduation ceremony a couple weeks later. But after THAT.

* * *

Remember our little house flood before we moved in? Well, the company came to grind down the old mold part and spray an anti-fungal cleaner all over everything. They covered the area in plastic and hooked up a dehumidifier that ran constantly for two weeks. After the wall had some time to sufficiently dry, they checked moisture levels for repair work and cleared us to move forward. They're coming back next week "to fix it," but I don't know exactly what that means. Oh well. Progress!

Zac and I were also able to take an evening to finally visit the puzzle store and the thrift shops in Helsingør. Yes, my new town has a puzzle store, and I was not disappointed. It turns out that the shop gets artists to design a puzzle, then they are printed by Penny Puzzle in Turkey just for this shop! They only sell their Penny Puzzles and then a few from a dutch artist that makes a popular puzzle series.

Every puzzle has a little description and thank-you note printed right on the back, and they gave me a free, very nice canvas tote bag for free.

We couldn't help but stop by the record store on the way home. The record store in Helsingør only sells used records, so it's always a gamble, but sometimes, you find some really good stuff. I am pleased to say that this trip resulted in Zac and I finally scoring an original press of Kim Larsen's Værsgo album. Give us our Danish citizenship now, please!

The kids had a little bit of an extended Christmas break from school since the school itself was in the process of vacating the old building and moving into the new, large, purpose-built school. Kaden and Khloe's grades had planned a work-from-home week the week before break, so the week before the week before Christmas, they got to close out the year with some fun games and activities in their classrooms (in addition to all the packing).

Harrison had to go to school the first three days of the week and then he just got the last two days off. After I dropped him off at school one day, I was driving home with my heated seat cranked way up (this was during my prolapsed disk time), wishing I could go sink into a hot bath, and I saw the elderly man on the corner struggling to unload his giant firewood delivery into a wheelbarrow so that he could haul it down the drive around the back of the house to stack it. I remembered how much work it was for Zac and Kaden and I to move all the wood from our delivery, so when I got home, I roused the older kids from their beds and told them to get dressed and go help. Kaden was not opposed to being woken up and having to go do manual labor, but he was terrified of trying to go talk to a complete stranger, so I had to rally my strength and walk the two blocks with the kids to offer our help.

As we approached, we saw him standing behind the rack of firewood trying to shove the top pieces off from behind with a 2x4. The wood was shooting out the front, one piece at a time, bouncing off the wheelbarrow, and tumbling into the bike lane. Passersby were kindly just picking them up and placing them in the wheelbarrow. The kids were glad we came to help. The man did not speak English, and Danish is hard enough to understand without adding the challenge of an elder gentleman's gravely voice, but I did my best. I will admit that we struggled to communicate our plan and divide up the jobs for a few minutes, but finally, we were in business. Khloe loaded the wheelbarrow and brought it behind the house for Kaden to stack, and with a two-wheelbarrow system, it went very smoothly.

I couldn't bend or lift, so I just tried to converse with the man in Danish. I got a tour of his lovely home. He brought out Cokes and peach iced teas from a fridge in the garage for the kids. The kids made pretty quick work of things and I was very proud of them. The man's wife came home from a doctor's appointment at the end. She spoke English pretty well, so I just explained who we were and why we were in her yard. The man went inside and brought us out a box of chocolates for helping after I refused to let him pay the kids, and we gave them our phone number in case there is more work to be done throughout the year.

I was getting pretty stressed out about all the work I was missing because of my back problem, especially since it was right at the end of the year before vacation time. I was crying to Zac about how I was sure they were disappointed in my performance and my absences. He told me I needed to let go of my U.S. mindset, and that in Denmark, they really just want me to take the time to heal properly so I can get back to 100% and carry on. I knew he was right, but I can't undo a lifetime of having it drilled into me that a sick employee is a useless employee, and when my boss said she wanted to Teams with me to talk about something, I couldn't help but be nervous.

I didn't get in trouble. I got promoted. I guess they think I'm doing a good job, back injury and all! We got sushi to celebrate, and it was a really nice Christmas surprise.

* * *

As my back healed, I had a lot of Christmas shopping to wrap up. Vibe and I went on our standard outing to the mall in Lyngby. We had coffee and lunch and were fairly productive. Sadly, we waited until just a few days before Christmas, so I was a little stressed at how many gifts I hadn't been able to find.

The following day, Kaden and I were just getting ready to walk into town to pick up his prescription and make an attempt to finish Christmas shopping when I got a text from the former owner of our home. He wanted to invite Harrison to go to the library with him and his son. Harrison got ready quickly and joined us for our walk downtown. We met up outside the library and I admitted that I had been scared of going in because I didn't know how the library system worked in Denmark. Lasse helped me get a library account and the person at the desk showed me how to check out books. Kaden and I left Harrison with Lasse and walked back to do our errands.

I was not very successful, but I got a few things and some stocking stuffers. When Harrison met back up with us outside the shopping center, I made a choice. I sent the boys home with the purchases I had made, grabbed a toasted sandwich, a bottle of water, and a juice at Joe and the Juice, and hopped a train into Cophenhagen. I hit up bookstores and high-end retailers on the walking street and trekked all over in search of some final gifts. Finally, feeling a little defeated, I got a train home. Zac picked me up at the station and I resigned myself to the fact that I was going to be missing a few presents.

The next day, the day before Christmas Eve, I had to go to one last physical therapy appointment in Birkerød. After my appointment, I was feeling good, so I decided to go to the town center to see if I could maybe finish up my shopping list. The stars aligned and I had incredible luck. After only an hour or so, I was totally done with my list and on my way home! Not all days are winners, but sometimes, things work themselves out.

Zac worked right up until Christmas Eve. His job gets very inflexible around the times other people are taking their vacations. Fortunately, he was able to spend a little time with us. We really like that we can just walk into the city (Helsingør, not Copenhagen, to be clear), and we do it every chance we get. Before Christmas, we went thrifting for some candelabras, a holiday tablecloth, and some akvavit/snaps glasses. We found some excellent brassy candelabras - the fish in the centers are very apropos for living in a seaside port town. We got some great little glasses for our holiday snaps (no more will we shoot our fancy Bornholm akvavit from children's medicine dosing cups!), and I found a Georg Jensen julehjerte table runner. It wasn't a full table cloth, but I felt like it was a good score anyway. Too bad I don't have an iron.

We also went to a large liquor and wine shop. The shops in Helsingør are often in old, narrow buildings, so it's scary to maneuver through the shop without thinking of George Costanza from Seinfeld knocking over all the wine bottles with his Gortex coat, but we made it!

There are actually a lot of wine and liquor shops in Helsingør, and not because the people who live here drink more than the average Dane, but because they see a lot of traffic come over from Sweden to buy alcohol. In Sweden, all the alcohol above like 4% is sold in state-controlled shops that are only open during certain times. The age to purchase alcohol is higher, and I don't think you can drink in public, so Denmark is very liberal comparatively.

We also finally hit up the cheesemonger. The smell was pungent, but we got some fine cheeses for our holiday snacking and it was thrilling to imagine the kinds of tapas parties we could have when visitors come. (Hint, hint.)

* * *

Christmas Eve Eve was all about baking and prepping for more baking. I tried to teach Khloe some basic project management because I thought Gantt-charting our day would be fun. It turns out that there are some activities I find fun that other people do not. Hmm.

We baked brunkager (from pre-made rolls Zac grabbed in the canteen at work - I had good intentions again this year but didn't quite have the time) and made Grandma Debbie's old-fashioned sour cream cookie dough.

I haven't been happy with the pie crusts I'm making in Denmark because they don't have shortening widely available, but just before the holiday, I found a Danish baking store online that sold Crisco! I ordered two containers of it and hoped it might arrive before I needed to get pie crusts made. When the kids and I finished our brunkager and cookie dough, I got a message my Crisco had been delivered to the package shop, so Zac and I ran up to get it and I made the best freaking pie crust of my life!

We also got the cookies baked. They turn out perfectly puffy and delicious here! I struggled to make them as nice as my mom always did in the U.S. She uses butter-flavored Crisco and so did I, but that's not a thing here, as we've established, so I use something called Ama "perfekt til bagning" and they come out great!

I tried my hand and making my grandmother's Merry Mix recipe. Every year for as long as I can remember, my grandma has made Merry Mix at Christmas time. It's a recipe she has adapted over the years from the original Chex recipe from the 1950s. Basically, the original recipe uses different types of Chex cereal and peanuts, then you mix it all with melted butter, garlic salt, and Worcestershire sauce to make a buttery, garlicky snack mix. My grandma likes to mix in a lot of other things. I like the Cheetos and the goldfish crackers and the Gardetto rye crisps in there. Pretzels, bread crisps, and little breadsticks often make an appearance as well (I think that stuff got added when she started buying the big snack mixes at Costco).

Anyway, I did my best to follow the original 1950s recipe for the coating and using things I could get in Denmark to approximate my grandma's ingredients. There are no cheesy Goldfish crackers, but there are normal crackers vaguely shaped like fish. I don't have pretzel twists, but I have pretzel sticks. I don't have Gardetto's rye crisps, but I have rye bread chips, and you can't get regular Cheetos here, but you can get the weird varieties as a novelty food, so welcome to the mix, Cheetos Crunchy Sweet Chili!

Anyway, I did my best. The first batch was kind of burnt and tasted off. I called my grandma, and on her advice, I adjusted my oven temperature, my stirring intervals, and traded out the garlic salt for garlic powder. The second batch was less burnt and had a better garlic flavor. It still wasn't my grandma's Merry Mix, but it was a super acceptable substitute (that I think no one at except me).

* *.*

On Christmas Eve, we decorated the cookies we had baked. I made a sour cream frosting to complement the old-fashioned sour cream cookies, but I couldn't remember if it was the recipe for the good one I made last year or one of the runnier ones I made in past years.

(To add context, my mom always used Betty Crocker's sour cream frosting on her cookies when I was young, and it was really good. They discontinued it many years ago and she's been using the Betty Crocker's creamy white frosting instead. I have, in the past (in the U.S.), tried different recipes to get more of the sour cream frosting flavor because I liked it better. In Denmark, I have no choice but to make my own frosting because they don't sell it in a can here, and whatever I did last year set up really nicely.)

The frosting tasted freaking incredible - better even than the sour cream frosting of my childhood - but it was too runny when it was at room temperature. It had the consistency of cookie icing instead, which made decorating a challenge. Once we figured out how to work with it a little, it was OK, but it wasn't the most relaxing cookie decorating experience we've ever had.

Zac and I spent the rest of the day prepping and cooking for dinner. We made honey butter rolls, green bean casserole, and mashed potatoes to go with our rosemary-lemon-garlic roasted chickens, and a salted caramel pear pie for dessert. It was a simple feast, but it was all from scratch and it was really, really delicious.

See how nice our fish candelabras look on the fancy little un-ironed table runner?

After dinner, we had a video chat with Grandma Debbie and Great-grandma Iris while we opened our presents from them, and after we hung up, the kids opened the rest of their gifts. They were all very pleased.

Santa was going to scale back the gifts this year, but then accidentally didn't. The kids were so good and their requests were so pure and reasonable that he couldn't deny them.

The "in-between time" between Christmas and New Year's Eve cannot be separated. We played games, did puzzles, listened to music, drank wine, watched shows, and forgot how time worked in front of cozy fires. Kaden went on an ice skating date with a Danish girl he met through a school friend. Khloe went ice skating and shopping in Copenhagen with a friend. Harrison and the neighbor, Elliott, were inseparable and had sleepovers every night. We video-chatted with my dad and Zac's parents and my grandma, and I even got to talk to my great-aunt, Fran. The in-between time is relaxation at its best.

The days were all sunny and bright and terribly cold, but the sunshine made us want to go outdoors. Zac and I bought a Bosch garden shredder and started tackling all of the built-up old yard waste laying around in our new garden. As we were chipping away limbs and leaves, our back-side neighbors ventured over to say hello. We've now met two neighbors and I think we got very lucky with both. I took no pictures of our progress because my fingers were numb, but we did a good job and that little machine was well worth it. Yard work is fun now!

We got really chubby playing Scrabble and Sushi, Go! and eating until we physically couldn't eat more, so we also took a lot walks. The street is a little gritty and there's nothing inherently beautiful about the walk to town, so one day, Zac and I took a turn into Kong Peders Park. We walked through it past an outdoor gym and a pond and a lot of dog walkers enjoying the weather. We went all the way to the back side of my friend, Ann-Louise's house, which backs up to the park. We didn't stop since we knew they were busy with the holidays, but it was nice to see that the walk to her house is fairly easy and can be done almost entirely through the park!

We were pretty well set up for New Year's Eve, but we hadn't purchased a kransekage yet. You can almost always find it at the grocery stores, so I wasn't worried, but if you want the good bakery stuff, you should order in advance. We did not, but I saw on the good bakery website that they were making a few extra kransekage stangs since there was high demand. We didn't think we could make it there to get one since it's a bit of a walk and we weren't about to set an alarm to force us to wake up at a certain time during the in-between days, so we just left after we got up and had coffee.

The weather was still really lovely and we planned to stop at the bakery, make an effort to get a little goodie before they closed, and then walk around the castle. We actually got going pretty late, but I checked the bakery's Instagram and they didn't post about being sold out yet or antything, so we were a little hopeful. About halfway there, we found a wallet on the ground. The ID inside said that the owner lived a few blocks back the way we came on the top floor of an apartment complex. We knew we had to return it, even if it meant not making it to the bakery, so we did, and he was quite grateful.

I thought karma might actually reward us, and that we would show up to the bakery as they were closing their doors and they would shower us with discount kransekage that had remained unsold because everyone assumed they wouldn't be lucky enough to get some. Sadly, fortune often favors the prepared, not the lazy, so it didn't work out that way and the bakery sold out before we got there.

We still had a nice walk around the castle and the harbor though!

Kronborg Slot in the distance

Hercules battling the hydra

We stopped at the grocery store on the way home and got a normal kransekage tower for our New Year's celebration.

I kept my promise to Harrison by making risengrød for the nisse. I've never made risengrød, but it's a staple in Danish households. It's a rice porridge that they serve with a big pad of butter and cinnamon and sugar. Some people eat it for dinner. The traditional way of making it involves boiling it in the milk and then wrapping the pot in newspapers and putting it under your duvet to finish cooking for the next hour and half or so. I chose not to do that because it was my first time and I wasn't entirely sure of what I was doing.

You can see flecks of brown where I let the milk burn in the bottom of the pan, but overall, it had the right consistency and flavor, so I'll call it a win. I even had a half-Danish kid in my house to test it and tell me that it was right, so that was good.

Traditionally, risengrød is served around Christmas time, and most people make a lot of it on the 23rd - and oh my gosh, and have I told you that the 23rd is called "Little Christmas Eve" here? Just like Thursday is called "Little Friday," but I digress - and then they use the leftovers to make their Christmas dessert, risalamande. They serve their risengrød with a white ale called nisseøl, which is a very sweet, low alcohol content beer (like 1.5%). Even the children would drink it! I did buy some so the kids could try it with their risengrød, but no one liked the beer.

We only had small portions so we didn't spoil our dinners

Anyway, the reason I was making risengrød is that we have a nisse in our new home. A nisse (maybe you remember from previous Christmas posts) is an elf-like or gnome-like creature. They were said to live on farms in the barn, and they could protect the house and farm if you treated them well, but they could also get very vengeful and evil if you didn't take good care of them. They were especially busy at Christmastime, so people would leave the risengrød for them because it was their favorite dish. The lore has morphed over time, as people don't really have barns so much anymore. Now, the nisse live in the attic. They aren't as cute and generous as an Elf-on-the-Shelf or anything, and you never see them. Sometimes, they leave treats in your little paper cones on the Christmas tree, and sometimes, they turn your milk blue. But you can be sure that if you don't give them risengrød around Christmas, they'll make your life rough. Harrison was happy to receive candy, a new nisse hat, and a sled from our nisse throughout December, so he really wanted to ensure that I appeased ours before the year was over.

We assume our nisse comes out of this little door at the top of the stairs

The nisse left us some temporary tattoos, so I guess it was OK with the presentation of its December treat, but that was really generous because I didn't even warm it up or anything.

After our morning at the castle and our risengrød tasting, we watched the King's Speech, watched a climate activist get completely obliterated by a royal guard, and played Scrabble.

Kaden decided to build a fire pit in the garden and make more Viking bread, so he kept himself busy and it was pretty tasty. He serves it with butter and honey.

Harrison tried to stay up to ring in the new year with us, but he didn't quite make it. Zac and I toasted champagne and shared our kransekage with the kids. We stood out on our upstairs terrace wrapped in blankets and counted down to 2026. It was foggy out, so we could hear a lot of fireworks without seeing them, but soon, the closer neighbors started lighting them off and we could see a lot of very lovely aerial displays. We had the best seat in the house.

On New Year's Day, Zac got up and made French toast. I spent the day nålbinding (I aim to finish this sweater I started experimentally over the summer!), and we convinced a couple of the kids to play some games with us.

We said goodbye to our beautiful Christmas tree yesterday, and Zac and I took a walk to the yarn store to support my project. We watched a lot of Breaking Bad and finished a bottle of wine. I made klatkager (a kind of pancake) with our leftover risengrød based on a recommendation from Lene and they were kind of fun to eat with jam and powdered sugar.

The electrician came today to survey the work we'd like to have done and we did some chores. We are slowly easing ourselves back into reality, because after tomorrow, we're back into doctor's appointments and school meetings, physiotherapy and work, dates with friends, interviews with pet sitters, planning for trips, filing taxes, and all that normal life stuff. But gosh, what a glorious break we've had.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year from us to you.

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