Spring in Denmark: Hot Wheat Buns and Highly-Educated Drunks

Hello and welcome to the How to Live in Denmark podcast. I'm Kajsaander Melish. It's spring in Denmark, and spring is by. My favorite season here. The wonderful white Scandinavian sunlight is back after the dark days of winter. The flowers are coming out in the trees, and everybody's in a good mood. The outdoor cafes in Copenhagen are full of people again, sometimes draped in blankets to keep warm, but outside all the same. April and May are often the best months for weather in Denmark, along with September. Summers can be rainy, and the month of April is when Tivoli opens. Side note: when you see a man in Denmark with his trousers accidentally unzipped, you say, uh, excuse me, sir, Tivoli is open. Tivoli is one of the world's great non-disappointing tourist attractions. It's constantly updated with new shops, new rides, fresh flowers, fresh restaurants. And in the spring, it's not as crowded as it is in the summer. You can hang out all day, have a picnic, ride the roller coaster, even hear some bands play. And you'll have time to do that because spring is when the Danes' public holidays really stack up. There are 3 public holidays around Easter: Easter Thursday, Good Friday, and the following Easter Monday. And then several other public holidays, like Ascension Day and the Friday after it. And Whitsunday and the Monday after it. Plus Big Prayer Day, which is next week. Big Prayer Day is a Danish-only holiday, and there have been suggestions it should be eliminated in order to save money for the government or introduce a new Muslim holiday to go with all the Christian ones. Now, technically, there's no reason that Muslims or Buddhists or Jews couldn't all pray along on Big Prayer Day. But Big Prayer Day's origins are Christian. The day was a compromise. In the olden days, all sorts of guilds were laying down their tools for their own prayer days at inconvenient times. So it was decided to roll all the individual guild prayer days into one Big Prayer Day. Now, Big Prayer Day has its own traditions. For example, you're supposed to take a walk on Big Prayer Day. At one point it was a walk around the Copenhagen city ramparts, but those are gone now, and now it's just a walk. Anywhere. And Big Prayer Day has a special food known as hot wheat buns. Now, originally, bakers were closed on Big Prayer Day, so you'd get your wheat buns the night before and then heat them up on the day. Traditions like this are now mostly observed by Danish fundamentalists. Anyway, when I first came to Denmark, I arrived right before all these big holidays, and I didn't know anyone. I was living in a hotel, and I thought, What do people do with all these holidays? Now I know. You take a walk or a bike trip. You go to Tivoli. You go to your Danish summer house. Or if you're 14 years old, you get confirmed. Spring is also confirmation season in Denmark. In the Christian religion, confirmation is when you take responsibility as an adult within the church. So Thousands of Danish teenagers, having spent the winter learning the names of Old Testament prophets and Jesus's 12 disciples, are ready for confirmation in the spring. On each Sunday or public holiday in April or May, Danish churches are filled with up to 40 kids at a time going through confirmation ceremonies. The boys in new suits, the girls in pretty dresses. Now, as I've noted, Danes are not particularly religious. You might ask, what's with the big church service? The deal is each confirmation is followed by a party— a big party. Every member of the teenager's extended family is invited, and all of them are expected to bring money. Gifts of money are part of the confirmation experience— probably one of the best parts if you ask the teenagers. Then the day after the ceremony, the kids are allowed to skip school and go shopping to spend all their new cash. This is called Blue Monday, and it's an accepted indulgence and a great driver of the Danish economy. Shopping malls order extra clothes and electronics for the big wave of teenage shoppers. I've even seen some local tourist boards offer Blue Monday package trips for confirmation kids from the countryside. Of course, the confirmation service also has some advantages for the Danish church. It gets potential worshippers through the door right before they're 18, which is when they often decide whether or not to pay church tax. As spring fades into summer, another familiar sight appears in the streets of Denmark: slightly older teenagers wearing distinctive white canvas caps. These kids are now officially students in the Danish phraseology. That means they've finished their secondary education. The different colors of cap or ribbon on the cap indicate what type of education has been completed. Bordeaux color for an academic gymnasium, royal blue for a business school, dark blue for a technical school. Each school of students rents a giant open-back truck and drives around town to every single classmate's home, singing, screaming, honking horns. If you're taking a Saturday afternoon nap, a truck of students driving by will wake you up. The students have a drink at each stop, so by the end of the day they're pretty much falling off the truck. In my country, the United States, the liabilities lawyers would be all over this. One drunk kid would fall off the truck, sue the school, and the tradition would be ended forever. But this is Denmark, and spring traditions live on. That's the How to Live in Denmark podcast for this week. If you're going to be in Copenhagen on May 2nd, we have a free event planned at the Made in Denmark store at Brøllæggergade 6. which is right off of Strøget. We will be doing the top 10 mistakes foreigners make in Denmark. Go leave a comment about your spring traditions at howtoliveindenmark.com or follow us on Facebook at How to Live in Denmark or on Twitter at How to Live in DK. You can buy the How to Live in Denmark book on Amazon or saxo.com. See you next time! Bye!