Erm... Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Oh yeah, and Happy Thanksgiving too. Okay, it has definitely been too long. In my own defense, it has been a very BUSY two months, and I did START a blog at least a couple times, only to get distracted and never finish. So I'll try to sum things up to the best of my ability. The last couple of months have been my best here in Denmark. First, I moved in with a new family. An AWESOME family. They are incredible, and I feel like they were specifically picked just for me, because we just click. Already within the first couple of weeks living here, my host sister and I were great friends. Then came Thanksgiving. My host mother prepared an amazing American Thanksgiving meal, and I was super impressed. Turns out that my host family lived in the states for a while, so they know what it's all about. I think for this blog entry, I'm just going to try to remember all the moments in the past few months where the thought "Whoa! Totally blogworthy!" came into my head, and just sort of list those. The next that I can think of would be my first Christmasy get-together with my friends. We were out at Stine's house in Astrup, and it was super fun. We were all sitting around the table drinking tea, when all the sudden people started pouring powdered sugar onto the table. I was confused. Then they took marzipan (which comes in tubes like cookie dough here) and rolling it in the powdered sugar. This, I learned, is a Danish Christmas tradition. They use all sorts of different things-food coloring, nougat (mmmmm....), hazelnuts, sprinkles, etc.-to mold and decorate the marzipan into basically whatever they want. (I'll see if I can attach a picture of this at the end.) While this was going on, I got my first real dose of Christmas-season homesickness. We had Christmas music playing from the living room, and most of it was in Danish, so I wasn't paying all that close attention to it. But as I was sitting, in the awesome and incredible (Really the ONLY word that can describe the feeling is hyggeligt which is something I can't say in English. Sorry.) things that were going on (and tearing up from the pure joy in the room that you could have cut with a knife-I know it sounds cheesy and ridiculous, but seriously. I almost cried.) I realized that the song that was playing in the background was in English. Naturally, I was intrigued, so I went into the living room to listen. I started the song over, and then I was standing in the corner listening to Christmas For Cowboys by John Denver. So then, I was standing in the corner bawling and hiding my face in my sweater. I was determined not to let my friends notice, but I'm sure they could probably hear me from the other room, so they picked up pretty quickly. I got a big group hug from a few of my friends, sobbed a little, wiped my snot on my sweater, and moved on with my day. Which, by the way, was awesome. We went sledding, ate our weight in marzipan, played some sort of children's board game, and laid in front of the fire to dry our socks. BUT! Ever since I started writing this blog entry (yes, it has been a work in progress for several days) I have been asked about eighty seven times to post a new blog entry. So I'm going to stop working now, and post as-is. If I think of more, I'll try to post it later on. But don't forget, I am super busy over here. Cut me a little slack. Haha.

The marzipan creations are at the to because I couldn't figure out how to move them to here. Sorry.