Goodbye November - hello December

We have now lived in the US for so long that Thanksgiving starts feeling like a good old friend rather than a fluffy unrelatable concept. I like having a time of the year dedicated to being grateful (and for now I’ll turn the blind eye on how the Indians were treated and the people injured during Black Friday shopping for 2$ waffle makers). And on top of this it marks the first break from school of the school year.

This year we spent Thanksgiving with some of my colleagues. I had bragged about my amazing maple-bacon-pecan pie. I have made it once before where it turned out to be out-of-this-world delicious. This time? Not so much.....😬I still haven’t figured out how it got that dry but it sure did look nice:

And after over eating all night and getting home way late there’s nothing quite as wonderful as setting the alarm for 5:30 to go Black Friday shopping, right?

Teresa and I (or maybe it was just me.....) made the grand plan of getting some of those awesome gift card JC Penny’s usually gives out. Well, this year they decided to pass them out Thursday night, and we were not the only super disappointed early birds. We walked around the mall for a bit and did not find a single thing we wanted to buy. After 45 minutes we decided to give up, go home, get the car and drive to Target instead. We did not get any really good deals, but we got all the Christmas shopping for family back in Denmark all done.

And then we blinked and suddenly it was December:

And quite to my surprise Kristian has made me an advent calendar! For the first time in 20 years (I still remember opening a present containing hollandaise sauce......)! I have to admit that I was a little scared to start opening the gifts, but the first two have been awesome. Here are my “fleece navidad” socks:

And we have started looking out for gifts for “pakkeleg” (the infamous Danish gift exchange game, where you are allowed to lie and cheat and steal - needless to say all (or maybe most..... or at least some) of my colleagues love it. Unfortunately Teresa won’t be home for it this year as she is going to Chicago with her German class. This has caused quite the comments form my coworkers: “yay. Team Frikke is one member down. That means that there will actually be gifts for the rest of us” or “Phew. I remember sitting next to her last year. She cheated SO much” or - from the professor himself - “remember, Danes can never be trusted!”.

I have no idea where they got their misconceptions about Danes from......