Sorry, Desdemona... we didn't sing any Swedish songs.. My father's parents were Danish, but we didn't sing any Danish songs, either.

My Grandmother came over to this country from Denmark as a teenager to work as a housemaid for the Diamond family... those of the Diamond Match fortune. I wrote a song about my Grandparents with the line, "Grandma worked for Diamonds, she started at the top." My Grandpa was a tinsmith in Denmark and came over her as a young man. He met my Grandmother singing together in the church choir of a little Lutheran church in a Danish settlement in Wisconsin. I never heard either of them sing, though. My Father, for reasons he never explained, rejected everything about his Danish heritage, so what I know, I've learned from reading, and collecting Scandinavian music (very little of which is Danish.) My wife is African-American and we had an amazing ten days in Ghana last year. We had planned to go to Denmark this spring, but ended up buying a house, so we had to put it off.

I was the narator for a Santa Lucia festival at a Lutheran Church a few years ago... a beautiful story. I also was narator for a story about Tomtens (know what they are? If you do, you're the first person I've ever met who does.)

Thanks for dog tradition! Maybe if we gave the first bite of breakfast to our dogs every day we wouldn't have so much trouble getting into our jeans, as another thread mentioned..

Jerry