Christmas in Denmark

     The Christmas I was twenty-two years old I fell in love—in a familial, not a romantic, way—with a Danish man and his family. I was living in Cambridge, England, where I was studying as a Marshall Scholar, and my Danish friend Maren had invited me to spend this, my first Christmas away from home, with her family in Bagsvaerd, Copenhagen.

    Maren's family was as merry as my own. I felt at home with them at once. Niels and Ursula, Maren's father and mother, lived in a narrow, semidetached, three-story house filled with original paintings by artist friends of Ursula's parents.

Ursula in her living room

These artists had often used Ursula and her siblings as models, and one of the paintings depicted Ursula as a child in a blue dress with a handful of flowers she had just picked. 

    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. Maren's sister, Stine, 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. Maren took me to visit her grandmother, who lived in a beautiful old house along the harbor and had an exquisite collection of doll houses, some with miniature paintings of the pictures in Ursula's house that those same artists had reproduced for her. 

    When Maren had to study for exams, she sent me on a train excursion to Hamlet's castle in Helsingør with her boyfriend, Troels, who, in spite of not speaking English, didn't seem averse to the idea. She gave me a map of walks through 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 mealtime, Maren and I carried steaming platters of food up a flight of stairs to the dining room. 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 itself 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 a l'amande for dessert. It was so good I asked Ursula if I could have the recipe. When she wrote it out for me, on the paper I still have in my recipe box, she told me that it's easy for rice cooking in milk to burn on the bottom of the pan. She told me with twinkling eyes I would need a husband to stir it for me. (Consequently I didn't make it for years, until I finally decided I could watch the rice on my own and didn't need a husband.)

    Traditionally, the cook leaves one whole almond in the dessert. Whoever finds it has good luck the rest of the year.

    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 that when my friends asked what kind of nuts they were, I couldn't remember what they were called.

    From the time of that Christmas, gilded with family warmth and Old World charm, I have been Niels and Ursula's "American daughter." I have written to them occasionally, always at Christmas, always with a special fondness for Niels. When I revisited Denmark five or six years ago, I went to see Niels and Ursula again. 

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. Nonetheless, Niels walked with Maren and me through the backyard garden, and 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 dignity because I loved him. 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. I'm wearing a flowered skirt and am sitting in the garden among flowers, looking at Niels impishly and fondly.

    Years later 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 a l'amande, evoking one last time the magical Christmas when he had welcomed to his family a shy young American girl and had taken a place in her heart.

Next week: "My Reputation Takes a Beating"

Recipe from this post: Ris a l'amande

RIS ALAMANDE

This is the recipe just as Ursula wrote it down for me on now faded, cream-colored, linen-textured paper. The misspellings and grammatical idiosyncrasies are in the original. Below her version, I have given the English equivalent measurements.

(10 persons)

1) 1000 gr. (1 liter) milk boiling

2) add 125 gr, rice. Cook for about 20-25 minutes

    (Take care, it will burn in the bottom)

    add a teaspoon salt

    cool it down.

3) 3/4 liter cream to be whipped

4) 125 gr. or more almonds (take off the brown with fingers after some minutes in boiling water) to be cut in very small pieces

Mix 1, 2, 3, and 4 very cautiously. (keep it cool)

English equivalents

4 cups milk

1 cup rice

3 cups cream

4.5 ounces almonds (or more)

My notes:

(1) Don't forget to leave one almond whole.

(2) Don't boil almonds more than one minute, or they'll get soft.

(3) Although I wouldn't malign Ursula's recipe for the world, I would, for my taste, add a teaspoon of vanilla and maybe also a couple of tablespoons of sugar to these ingredients. And don't you think chocolate chips would be a nice addition? Untraditional, but good.