Denmark: Julefrokost – The Danish Christmas Party

December is here and in Denmark, this means Julefrokost season! Julefrokost, Christmas lunch, is a Danish Christmas party, which usually starts at noon and goes on until last man standing. We eat different kinds of traditional Danish Christmas food and drink a lot of schnapps.

Usually we start with fish and seafood dishes such as pickled herring, fish fillet and shrimp. Then follows the hot dishes including, but not limited to, medisterpølse (a Danish sausage), liver pate and julekål (Christmas cabbage), the latter being one of those things you hate as a kid, but you grow up to like or at least tolerate. The dessert is usually Risalamande (rice pudding with almonds) served with hot cherry sauce, similar to the one we have on Christmas Eve.

Danish Christmas food is definitely to the heavy side, so after a couple of hours, there are usually only two outcomes: Either you’ll enter food coma, or you’ll get seriously wasted from all the schnapps you drink along with the food. It’s a fun tradition, and even though I’ve been to Christmas parties in several other countries, I’ve never found anywhere, where they do Christmas parties like the Danes (though you can read my blog post about our julefrokost in New York City, which came very close to the original).

The photos and the video below are from a Christmas party I went to at my parents’ friends’ place, so it was a bit more civilized than what I’ve described above, and even though there were schnapps and beer, we were all back home at 7pm:)