The first big different between a Canadian and Danish Christmas is that Christmas occurs on the 24 rather than the 25. Presents are opened on the 24th, but not in the morning like in Canada. Children have to wait until after dinner and after dancing around the Christmas tree to open them. Ben and I decided early on that we would open our presents on Christmas eve. I missed the magic of having one last sleepless night before Christmas. It was a different experience waking up on the 24th and having to wait all day to open them. Ben and I also did not end up dancing around the Christmas tree. Our tree was siting on our window sill, making it very hard to dance around. Maybe next year....
Another magical fact that I read about Danish Christmas was that on the 24th of December, animals can talk. One of the biggest omens of bad luck for the coming year occurs if you hear an animal speaking ill of you. To ensure that the animals do not speak ill of you, you are supposed to feed the animals on this day (even birds, squirrels, etc). We had two dogs, Mr Quigley and a friend, staying with us over Christmas and I did not want to take any chances of them speaking ill of me. So they were given treats all day long. Later on I asked a couple of Danish friends about this tradition. Neither of them had ever heard of this tradition and thought it must have been a more prevalent 100 years ago, when farming was more prominent.
The dogs were even allowed to open the above earlyChristmas gift.
A typical Danish Christmas dinner consists of either duck or pork, potatoes cooked in sugar, red cabbage, and brown sauce. This meal is eaten on the 24th. We decided early on that we would rather experience our little Christmas on the 25th, so on the 24th Ben and I enjoyed some steaks with Montreal steak spice. Our day of eating on the 25h with Kelly bringing over a gourmet afternoon of five wines paired with small courses. Included in some og her amazing courses were: salmon and dill spread, fantastic french cheese and cherry sauce, and all the cured meats Ben could ever imagine.
We were hardly hungry for any dinner after eating Kelly's amazing food all day long, but we did our best to cook and eat a Danish-Canadian dinner (after of course watching the Chevy Chase Christmas Vacation movie). We decided it would be fun to make cornish game hens for Christmas (we had been eating a lot of pork and duck lately). I was, however, unable to find cornish game hens at the grocery store and picked up instead a couple of French Yellow Chickens. We used one of our favourite recipe databases, the LCBO online resource, to find our Christmas recipes. We stuffed our yellow chickens with a portabello mushroom stuffing and made a plum salsa to accompany them.
Last year Ben and I prepared the entire Swedish Christmas dinner menu outlined in the LCBO 2009 Holiday edition. The saffron dinner rolls turned out so well that i decided it would be a shame not to make them again. But just like everything else that I have baked lately, they turned out much drier than the previous year...still good though. For the Danish part of our dinner, we made the sugared potatoes and the red cabbage. I made the red cabbage from scratch last year for the Swedish dinner and did not like it one bit. This year I opted to buy a jar of it pre-made (what most Danes do) and I will admit that I liked it much better than my version. The potatoes were awesome!
The highlight of the night for everyone was the traditional Danish dessert, ris ala mande. Not because it was good, it actually did not turn out as thick as it was supposed to, but because there is a special present associated with the dessert! There is one full almond place inside the pudding, and the person who finds the almond in their dish receives the 'almond present'. I bought the present this year and made sure one of the three bowls had the full almond inside. I let Ben and Kelly pick their bowls first and was ultimately very luck that neither of them picked the bowl with the full almond inside...meaning I WON THE ALMOND PRESENT! Here is a photo of Ben and the almond present below...I let him take it into work to hang in his office, to give it a real Canadian ambiance.
Merry Christmas and God Jul everyone!
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