Holidays, buses, and barrels...

"A love for tradition has never weakened a nation, indeed it has strengthened nations in their hour of peril"

- Winston Churchill

Danes love their traditions.  They also really really love their holidays and decorating the city for them.    

I loved that in November they put mustaches on all of the city buses in honor of movember.  Movember is an event for the month of November where guys grow mustaches to raise awareness for prostate cancer.

 This past week the buses have grown flags.  Apparently the flag is put up for birthdays of the royal family, when important people come to town, and pretty much anything else important happens.  But this pas week the flags are up for Crown Princess Mary's birthday on February 5th and Princess Marie's birthday.  Princess Mary is married to the heir to the Danish throne, Crown Prince Frederick and Princess Marie is married to the younger Prince Joachim.

But today is actually Fastelavn, Denmark's Mardi Gras or Carnival.  The weird part about this holiday is that it seems to also be the Danish Halloween.  Traditionally a black cat was placed in a barrel and then children would hit the barrel until the cat was dead.  Yeah some tradition.  Thankfully today's version is a little less sadistic.  A barrel is still used as a Danish sort of Pinata however the barrels today is filled with candy.       

Another tradition is fastelavnsris.  This amazing tradition involves children ritually flogging their parents to wake them up on the morning of Fastelavns, and American parents thought Christmas morning was rough.  The children flog their parents with bunches of twigs decorated with feathers, egg-shells, storks and little figures of babies.    

Not only do kids get to flog their parents on this day, but they get rewarded with fastelavnboller, basically cream puffs, afterwards.  

Children in Denmark also go trick-or-treating on Fastelavn.  However instead of candy the children get money.  So of all of these tradition the only one I can think of adopting in the U.S. is the money instead of candy part.  The children also sing this song in order to get the money:

The song translates to:

Mardi Gras is my name,
buns I want.
If I get no buns,
I will make trouble.
Mardi Gras is my name
buns in my stomach.
If I get no buns,
I will make trouble.

Basically I think this is one day where children get too much power.  I under no certain terms ever want my children to flog me, beat a cat in a barrel until it's dead, or sing a song threatening people with trouble if they don't give them sweets.  But that's just me.


Random Danish/Scandinavian Facts:
- Finland is home to the World Championship of Wife Carrying, the prize is the wife's weight in beer.
- Rekjavik, the capital of Iceland, has sidewalks that are heated by geothermal heat in the winter so that no one has to shovel them (This idea is genius, too bad Wisconsin doesn't have any geothermal power)
- In most of Norway the sun is only up for 3 hours a day, a phenomenon that is said to affect and slow pregnancies of Norwegian women.  There are more births in Norway in April than any other month.