Christmas in Denmark

        When I was 22 years old and in school at Cambridge University, in England, my Danish friend, Maren, invited me to spend that Christmas, my first away from home, with her family in Bagsvaerd, Copenhagen.

           I loved Maren's family at once: her mother, Ursula; her father, Niels; her sister, Stine, who was there with her baby, Ulreg, whose father (shockingly to me at that time, given my Southern upbringing) was African and who was also there from time to time. Because they were a family as merry as my own, I immediately felt at home with them. I was enchanted by their tiny house, a narrow, semidetached, three-story house filled with original paintings by artist friends of Ursula's mother. These artists had often used Ursula and her siblings as models when they were growing up. One of the paintings, of Ursula as a child in a blue dress with a handful of flowers she had just picked, later hung in Maren's house in Gothenburg, Sweden.

Ursula in the living room, many years later

           In that fairy-tale house I slept in a bed tight under the eaves in the room of Maren's brother, Benjamin, who was spending the year on a schooner. (In later years, I got to know him, and his family, too.) Maren took me to visit her grandmother in a beautiful old house along the harbor, where she had a collection of exquisite doll houses, some with replicas of the paintings in Ursula's house, reproduced in miniature by those same artists.

            Maren was busy studying for exams, so she sent me on a train excursion to Hamlet's Castle in Helsinge with her boyfriend, Troels. She gave me a map of walks thorough the King's deer park in Bagsvaerd, where I wandered under Danish beech trees and around the hunting castle on the hill. She put me on the train to Copenhagen for a day in that ancient city spangled for Christmas.

          Ursula's kitchen was so small everything was within reach from one place, fittingly, as Ursula, too, was small. At meal times Maren and I carried steaming platters of food up a flight of stairs to the dining room (and I thought about Ursula cooking in that downstairs kitchen and sending platters of food up the stairs every day, year after year, throughout Maren's childhood). Classical music played on the record player. When Niels put on Bartok, the rest of the family groaned in mock complaint. That I liked Bartok delighted Niels, and he and I became comrades in exile whenever he played Composition for Two Pianos and Percussion or one of the string quartets.

            The Christmas celebration was exuberantly and warmly rich with family and national traditions. The Christmas tree, crowded into the living room and decorated with exquisite ornaments, twinkled with scores of candles on the tips of branches. On Christmas morning we joined hands and danced around the tree. There was music on the piano and a great Christmas feast with the traditional ris alamande for dessert.

           Among the many presents under the Christmas tree that year was a package from my family in Georgia that included a box of pecans, exotic fare to my Danish friends. It's symptomatic of how much I had come to feel at home in my life abroad that when my friends asked what kind of nuts they were, I couldn't remember what they were called. It's symptomatic, too, of how much more isolated countries were in the sixties. Now, pecans can certainly be found in Denmark.

           From the time of that Christmas, gilded with family warmth and Old World charm, I was Niels's and Ursula's "American daughter." I wrote to them occasionally, always at Christmas. When I revisited Denmark with Maren in 1996, we went to see Niels and Ursula.

Maren, Ursula, Niels

They were old, now, and old age had not been kind. Niels was almost crippled with a bad hip, Ursula nearly blind, but they were as gracious and cheerful as ever. Niels walked with Maren and me through the backyard garden. Ursula served us wine and Danish cookies in the living room with its beautiful paintings. When Maren and Ursula carried dishes into the kitchen and I was alone with Niels, I gently brushed crumbs off his chest, hoping not to offend him but wanting to help him reassert his dignity. I have a picture of me that Niels took that afternoon. He was an old man. His hands weren't steady, and his eyesight wasn't good, but the picture is beautiful. In it I'm wearing a flowered skirt and am sitting in the garden among Ursula's flowers, looking at Niels impishly and fondly.

Maren took a picture of Niels taking a picture of me in Ursula's garden.

The picture Niels took of me

           One night not too many years after that visit, I had a dream about Niels, a vivid, powerful dream, pulsatingly psychic. I woke up profoundly moved and felt I should write Niels immediately. Two days later I got an email from Maren telling me her father had had a stroke and probably wouldn't live long. When he recovered enough to live (as it turned out, for a couple of months more, though in a state of constant sleep), I sent him a letter, which Stine read to him. I told him about my dream and spoke of our Christmas together, of Bartok and the beautiful tree with its candles and ris alamande, evoking one last time the magical Christmas when he had welcomed to his family a shy young American girl who had fallen in love with them all.