Danes have a dramatic desire to beat those winter blues and get ready for spring in February. Their solution? Dressing up like deamons, hitting stuff repeatedly with baseball bats, and eating so much candy and sweets that they're put into a sugar-induced catatonic state until spring. Works for me.
Here's a video of last Sunday's event in Nanna's neighborhood:
(the girl with the big red thing that can't walk is a mail box)
Yes folks, that's the concept of Fastelavn, a one-day holiday that coincides with Fat Tuesday (last week). It's part-Halloween, part-Mexican birthday party, part-Danish ingenuity. Basically, people dress themselves and their kids up in costume and head outside, where they meet up with other kids to beat the crap out of a wooden barrel full of candy with a baseball bat.
The one who breaks the barrel gets more candy. The one with the best costume (done by a democratic voting process) gets even more candy. The one who gets the last piece of wood down gets even even more candy.
Side note: Despite being a very health-concious society, Denmark must have the highest candy-consumed per-capita rate in the world (Dental care is free for kids, so why not?).
In Nanna's neighborhood, the adults got a try too. First the women, then the men. The barell was full of candy, but the adult prizes were Denmark's second most precious commodity: booze.
Despite the enthusiasm, we didn't win.
1 comments:
Love this tradition! A kind of Danish pinata!
And I agree - it's about time spring came along...
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