Page 68 of A Copenhagen Snowmance
“Well, I had thought I’d go to the bigJuleaftendinner they serve at the Danish Church by Regent’s Park. Danes who are in London and away from family at Christmas can come and eat together. I went last year, and it was lovely. Lots of fun. Or else, I guess I would have spent the evening by myself.”
Jamie pulls a sad face at her.
“Shut up. I am excellent company and perfectly happy to entertain myself.” Binge-watching some murder series might not be overly Christmassy, but there would have been a bottle of port to make up for it.
He holds his hands up. “Not judging. I might have been doing the same.”
“Don’t give me that. Someone would have invited you to join their dinner. You’re ridiculously popular.”
He busies himself with his duck. Something clicks in her head.
“Jamie, did you already have an invitation for tonight?” It hadn’t occurred to her that he might. She’d simply assumed he was like her, alone, and them having their own Christmas dinner was the obvious, yet only choice.
“Just two,” he says. “Three at most.”
“And you chose not to go?” She’s stunned.
“I’m sure they would have welcomed you, too,” he says, “but I didn’t actually ask them.”
“Why not? You could have gone. Without me, I mean. I would have understood.”
He rolls his eyes at her, like she’s being a dummy.
“Could it possibly be, Anna, that the idea of spending the evening with you, just us, sounded way more perfect to me?”
His honesty, even in light of her dismissing his offer, is disarming. It makes her blush. “Oh, well, OK. If you put it like that…”
He holds his glass up towards her. “Glædelig Jul, Anna,” he says in his best Danish. And she returns it with a clink.
They eat, savouring the flavours of the Christmas meal, him as it’s something new, Anna as it’s pure nostalgia on a plate.
“You look happy,” he says, watching her.
“I don’t think I could ever be unhappy eating Danish Christmas food.”
“Well, they do say Danes are the happiest people on Earth.”
“I hear this all over the place whenever I say I’m from Denmark,” she says, one hand propping up her chin and the other running a finger around the rim of her glass. “But I think we’ve been knocked off that top position by the Finns. Having thought about it, though, I think it depends on your definition of happy.”
“How do you mean?” asks Jamie. “Happy is happy, isn’t it?”
“The way I see it, here in Denmark if you have what you need you are content. If you are content, then you are happy. But having lived in other places now, I see it’s not always the same. Some people feel they need more money, more material things, newer gadgets, always something more than what they have. Never enough. So, it’s not the same. Contentment seems like a forgotten state in some places from my observation, but that might just be me.”
“I haven’t thought about it that way,” says Jamie. “But Danes like their material things. I’ve seen their appetite for the designer furniture.” He gives the Carl Hansen chairs on the other side of the Hans Wegner coffee table a nod.
“Beautiful things designed to last,” she says of them. “Feathering nests with pleasing things. Part of conjuringHygge, which is part of the contentment.
“Trust is another tenet of the contentment,” she goes on. “Danish society functions on trust. ‘I will trust people I meet, and they will rise to that trust, and in turn trust others, who will rise to their trust and so on, and as a result society will function with decency.’ If you think and live like that, life feels less perilous and less likely to bite you in the arse, which, like tradition, feels reassuring and makes you more content.” She believes it, because she’s seen the flipside, how broken trust can banish contentment.
“I’m not sure when I last used the word ‘content’,” he admits.
“Precisely, but maybe because it isn’t thought of so much in the UK? Words mean different things to different people,” she says. “Take luxury, for example. If you ask people what luxury means, some will say it’s swanky hotels or expensive restaurants, exclusive consumer brands, but if you ask, say, new parents ‘What is luxury?’ I bet many will say that it’s waking up of your own accord in the morning followed by leisurely sex and then having a snooze after.”Just like our morning the other day, she doesn’t say. “That’s not something they can do with children, not unless the kids are having a sleepover elsewhere. For them that would be luxury.”
Jamie laughs. “How have you come about this information?”
“Ahh, that would be Katrine. She’s constantly telling me how she’d kill for a lie-in.”
They carry on chatting about their friends in both Scotland and Copenhagen, of things they’d like to see in the coming year, of her travel plans, while they polish off their platefuls and seconds– because, of course, in Denmark there’s always seconds. The shame of sending someone home hungry would be unbearable.
