As most of the software companies in India have clients in US or Europe, we also get involved in Christmas celebration as we have less work during that time or forced vacation or year end time .. so time to chill :)
Last year I got chance to see the traditional christmas celebration in Denmark. Like we celebrate Deewali in India, people in Denmark visit their relatives during christmas time. They have one special lunch organized called Christmas Lunch. Actually I am in doubt whether it should be called Christmas Lunch or Christmas Dinner. Because the lunch which I attended started in afternoon around 2 pm and continued till 7 pm :)
It was my friends colleague who invited 3 of us for christmas lunch. Tradition says when we go for it, each of us have to buy a gift(small gift) because they play some kind of game after lunch.
We bought the gifts and went their at 2 pm...took around 30 mins to find the house. Before going there my colleague has asked about who will come and we came to know that it will be only the family who will have lunch with us. So after our arrival they introduced us to the family which consisted of -
My friends Danish colleague, his wife, three kids, father, mother, brother in law, sister and her daughter. So we were around 13 people.
Our lunch started with some traditional danish dishes (made up of meat, chicken, fish) and traditional drink red wine. So we discussed about India, Denmark, movies bla bla bla... So slowly and slowly they started to bring new dish and new drink and our discussion continued... more dishes ... more drinks and more discussion... This continued till 5 pm....
After that we started playing christmas game where we will seat in round. All the gifts bought by each one of us and each one of them will be kept at the centre of table. Then turn by turn each one of us will get chance to through a dice. If we get 6 on that, we can take one gift from the table. Once all the gifts are taken, we will continue the game, and now if homebody gets 6 in the thrown dice, he/she can take somebody else's gift... and there the fun starts. This game is continued for some time ... They try to make sure that at the end kids get atleast one gift...
After the christmas game, we have to eat our last traditional dish.. which is similar to khir and drink red wine...
Most interesting part of the whole lunch was, we had lot of discussion with my colleagues parents. They were very nice and talkative... And they felt so nice as this was a total different Christmas lunch experience for them....
You can see in below picture about how much there people drink.... too too much :)
