Photographs: Pexels
Text: Heather Storgaard
Every country has their own Christmas music to accompany the season of joy, whether you love it or very quickly want to throw speakers out of each department store. But how well do you know the Danish soundtrack to December? Here are some tips on what you might end up hearing or even joining in with yourself.
Julekalender
There are now so many years of Julekalender that it is completely impossible to escape the Scandinavian Christmas phenomenon each day leading up to Christmas (I nearly wrote Danish here, but some double-checking informed me that the format is actually a Swedish import!). Some of these releases are also the origin of much of the Christmas music blasting at you. I En Stjerneregn Af Sne by Mads Langer is certainly a contender for most over-played Christmas song, but you’ll no doubt be humming it even if you're feeling Scrooge-like.
Pigekoret
DR’s Girl’s Choir sing everything from contemporary hits to the classical hymns of choirs the world over. Their Christmas carols remain popular with a sense of nostalgia for years gone by for many. Their live Christmas concert from Copenhagen is another prominent point in the Christmas season and draws in crowds from across the country.
Dancing around the Christmas tree
The tradition that raises eyebrows among those of us from more health and safety-conscious lands, dancing around a Christmas tree decked in lit candles, is a must-have part of any Danish Christmas. Danes have been doing it for over two hundred years, typically accompanied by even more singing. Højt fra træets grønne top is a popular sing-along, lasting the test of time since it was written all the way back in 1847.
"Singing is a fun and relaxed activity, unlike just about any language class I have ever had to sit through."
Singing along?
My first Danish words were uttered while singing along, tipsily, to objectively quite awful 80s music at the end of a Julefrokost we were throwing. And maybe that doesn’t sound like a recipe for language success, but please read further and hear me out! Singing is a fun and relaxed activity, unlike just about any language class I have ever had to sit through. All you need is to be familiar enough with the tune and sounds, as you no doubt will be by the end of December with just about all Christmas music. Your mouth will then do the work for you! Hopefully, this will result in much less of the stumbling that typically accompanies attempts to match Danish words on paper with the tongue and throat contortion magic required to make the somehow corresponding sounds. At the time, I had no clue what my first words of Danish meant, but my now-husband and our friends all agreed that they were acceptable (maybe the Christmas beer helped their ears be sympathetic?). So give in and sing along to some of the Danish Christmas music!
Translations
If even the Christmas beer and abundant aquavit won’t convince you to give speaking Danish a go, the great thing is that so much Christmas music is international. As well as classics available in English and popular across the world, some classics have been translated and spread around the world in an assortment of forms. Danish friends of mine have previously insisted that "Glade Jul, Dejlige Jul" is a Danish original, but it’s, in fact, a re-working of the Austrian “Stille Nacht”, known as Silent Night in English. Famous in Germany and the UK for being sung together in both languages by troops during the Christmas Truce of the First World War, it epitomises the Christmas spirit. Translated into 320 languages and dialects, you could do a very messy, very international sing-along to this tune.