A move to a new country always entails moments of bewilderment and puzzlement. My move to Denmark was no exception. “I wonder why candy in Denmark is salty” I remember thinking on one of my first days here. And “why do people get so worked up about a sport virtually unknown to the rest of the world?” was another puzzling moment I experienced while witnessing my in-laws watching handball. Naturally there were many other questions and head-scratching moments – why is a right-wing government led by a party called ‘left’? and while we’re on the topic of politics, it’s a bit strange that the locals refer to their prime minister by his middle name… (yes, I realize it’s practical considering his predecessors, but it still sounds a bit funny). And what about that funny habit of answering the phone by stating your name – surely people know who they’re calling?! Or the fact that virtually all women’s names seem to end with an ‘e’.
Of course, with time one learns the origin of the local eccentricities, and if nothing else – one simply gets used to them. I no longer pause to contemplate the strangeness of seeing a woman wearing a fur coat riding a bicycle. And by now I’m pretty used to the locals imitating Swedish and Norwegian accents when they want to crack a joke. I still can’t get my head around the fact that people actually like paying taxes here, and I still can’t figure out why local bands insist on singing in English, but I guess some things take longer to work out.
Then a few weeks ago I joined the local Fastelavn celebrations with my partner and daughter, and was seriously puzzled once again. On a sunny day in a small and quiet residential neighbourhood, scores of parents and children gathered in what seemed to be an afternoon of harmless, family-friendly fun. Then suddenly two queues of children formed, from 2 year-olds (including my daughter) to teenagers, all waiting in line to grab a baseball bat and bash it onto a wooden barrel with all their might!
Call me a weakling, but the sight of children being encouraged by adults to tote a baseball bat and forcefully hit a barrel with it didn’t seem palatable to me. I asked some of the locals what this tradition was about, and as is the case in most countries with most people and most holiday traditions – they didn’t have a clue. Some told me about the origin of the tradition (there used to be a cat in the barrel, and the idea was to scare it away – even more dreadful!) but still didn’t know the meaning of it. Others talked vaguely about superstitious pagan rituals of banishing evil spirits. The funny thing – though somewhat expected – was that none of the locals, without exception, could see my point that kids banging on a barrel with a big baseball bat is something of an aggressive scene, not to say violent.
Further reading on the topic revealed that Fastelavn is really the Danish equivalent to Mardi Grad or Carnival – celebrations during the days before Lent, a historical fasting season in Christianity. And the slå katten af tønden thing (”hit the cat out of the barrel”) was indeed related to some safeguard against evil. And apparently the baseball bat bashing is not the only violent tradition during Fastelavn – there’s also fastelavnsris, bunches of twigs used by children to flog their parents to wake them up on the morning of Fastelavns Sunday. But I still couldn’t find an explanation for why a wooden barrel is used, requiring so much force to break it open that nothing short of a baseball bat would do. Couldn’t the Danes go for the Mexican cardboard piñata that bursts open with the soft pull of a string by an innocent child?
Perhaps some things are not meant to be understood but rather accepted. Holiday traditions are undoubtedly strange to the foreign eye in many countries – it took a comment from a foreigner to make me realize that calling the traditional Israeli Carnival-time cookies Hamantashen (literally meaning “the ears of Haman”, after the Jew-hating villain from the Book of Esther who ended up being hanged by Ahasuerus, King of Persia) was somewhat gory. Totally right, but for some reason it never occurred to me before.
So yes, being a foreigner gives one a great insight into things taken for granted by the locals. And every so often it means being shocked and puzzled in the most unexpected situations, while the locals look at you in wonder and dismiss you as weird. As you probably guessed by now, I quite enjoy those moments.
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