Christmas at Tivoli

We were in Copen- hagen Dec. 13 after I gave a talk at nearby Roskilde University, so we decided to see the Christmas decorations and fair at Tivoli, one of the world's oldest amusement parks.

One of the first things we saw was a parade of girls in white, singing the Italian tune Santa Lucia. It represents a traditional Swedish custom of young girls dressing in white on St. Lucy's day (which it happened to be) and bringing light in mid-winter.

Christmas shopping fairs are also a big custom in northern Europe. There were all kinds of booths selling different decorations, presents and kinds of food. Here is one that made me think of our son, Rolf, who is a very passionate advocate of buying fair trade goods from developing countries, that is, handicrafts made by artisans there and sold by companies who pledge to pay the artisans a fair price by world standards, not just the lowest price they can get away with, taking a huge mark-up for themselves. (It is the opposite of buying cheap goods made by poorly paid labor in China, for example. You pay more in part so the person who made it gets a living wage.)

It was a cold night outside, but kids were still very excited by the rides. We watched little kids on a very stylish, old-fashioned carousel. It was fun to see how enraptured the littlest kids were by riding the horses that moved up and down as the carousel turned. It made me get excited about the prospect of being a grandparent one of these days and getting to help take grandkids to something like this.

There was another area that was very popular with children, an elves' village, where there was a big, fairly elaborate set of scenes with elves and animals moving around, climbing mountains, skating, skiiing, drinking at the elves' pub -- shown in the picture here. We hit the human side of the pub, just opposite, for hot chocolate, honningkage (gingerbread-like honey cake) and æbleskiver (apple pastries). That was nice after walking around in the cold.

On of the odd things at Tivoli was the area set up for kids to go visit Santa's sleigh. It had a very funky Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer made of carpet with a light bulb nose and a very odd polar bear whose expression reminded Sandy of what she thought Renee Zellweger might look like after a night of hard drinking (if she had white fur and four legs).