Traditions

As you're probably aware, Denmark is a very old country. So, many of our traditions are also very old.

In the early spring we celebrate "Fastelavn", the Danish version of carnival. In the old days Fastelavn lasted for three days. You partied with plenty of good food and drink before fasting for 40 days during lent, which ended with the Christian Easter celebration.

All children wear a costume for Fastelavn. You decide what you want to dress up as. You can come as a robot, a ballerina, a ghost, or a chimney sweep. There are no rules, except to use your imagination and have fun.

We also play a game called "Slå Katten af tønden" (Kick the Kitty Cat). This is how the game is played: you take a wooden barrel and fill it with candy and little toys, hoist it up so it's hanging suspended it in the air. Now, all the children line up and take turns hitting the barrel with a wooden club. The point of the game is to smash the barrel so all the goodies fall out. Everybody who participates get a share of the loot, but there are two winners in the game: the Cat Queen, the person who brakes the barrel; and the Cat King, the person who knocks down the last remaining part of the barrel.

The reason the game has such an odd name is that in the old days there used to be a live cat inside the barrel. Obviously, this was a very cruel game and nobody does that anymore, but part of the tradition has survived.

We play the game at school, or sometimes somebody in your neighbourhood will arrange it, or you might play it in a one of the clubs or organizations that many Danes belong to.

Fastelavnsboller (sweet bun) is a special kind of bun you eat during Fastelavn. It's also customary that the children are given a "fastelavnsris", a wicker made of birch branches with small paper decorations and pieces of candy tied to it.

It is also part of the tradition that the children go door to door in their costumes to ask for candy or small change.

Usually we do this in a small group. When somebody opens the door, we sing a little song that goes something like this:

This part of the tradition is very similar to what American kids do at Halloween when they go trick or treating. In fact, nowadays many Danish kids like to celebrate Halloween in the fall. That way you can recycle your costume. However, the candy payoff is still better during Fastelavn.

We celebrate Easter like other Christians. It's a holiday and we get off from school. People like to get together with friends and family to enjoy an Easter lunch.

One of the Easter customs is to send an anonymous letter to somebody you know. The letter is a riddle. Instead of writing your name you sign it with as many dots as there are letters in your name, and you challenge the recipient of the letter to guess who the sender is:

If you manage to figure out who sent you the letter, then you write them back with a little message:

You see, if you manage to guess who the sender is, then that person owes you a chocolate Easter egg. On the other hand, should you fail; the sender can collect an egg from you.

During Easter there are eggs everywhere. We like to eat the special chocolate Easter eggs. Sometimes they are large and hollow, filled with smaller eggs. Supposedly it's the Easter Bunny that sneaks around and hides the children's eggs behind the bushes or under the furniture. However, I suspect that the parents might have something to do with it. It doesn't matter; an Easter egg hunt is always good fun.

There are other Easter customs as well. A strange tradition, practiced in a few places, is to decorate a hardboiled egg. Then everybody takes their egg to a designated hilltop. Each person has to roll his or her egg down the hill. Whoever has the egg that rolls the longest is the winner.

We also celebrate Skt. Hans on the 23rd of June. This celebration is similar to Christmas because it is also a combination of an old heathen tradition and a Christian tradition. We celebrate John the Baptist, but it also happens to be the longest day of the year, the summer solstice. We gather around bonfires and sing songs. Sometimes a figure in the shape of a witch is placed on top of the bonfire.

Skt. Hans marks the beginning of summer, and school is out for the next six weeks.

When we go back to school in the beginning of August, our next break from school doesn't come until October. In October we get a week off from school. It's not a religious holiday; it's just a fall break. In the old days they had a different name for this vacation. It was called "the potato vacation" because children in the country got out of school in order to help with the potato harvest.

When we get close to Christmas (you can read about the Danish Christmas in the factsheet "Danish Christmas") we walk in a Lucia procession in schools and kindergartens. The tradition actually comes from Sweden. It's a celebration of Skt. Lucia and the winter solstice.

In December we have another custom that is very important to Danish kids. It is a Christmas calendar where you can follow the countdown to Christmas Eve. You get to open a little present on each day in December until you reach the 24th. Sometimes the presents are a little bigger on Sundays. All the presents for each day are displayed on the calendar. So, it requires great self-discipline not to cheat and open all of them at once. But to do so is very bad form.

The different Danish TV companies participate in the Christmas countdown with special programming. They broadcast their own "calendar" shows. It's usually a Christmas story consisting of 24 little episodes with the last one on Christmas Eve. These shows are extremely popular, and even though they are made for kids many adults also like to watch them.