Goodnight Sun - Hello Christmas

Last weekend was a big weekend here. We officially said goodbye to the sun and welcomed in the Christmas season. It may seem a little premature for Christmas, but we have good reasons. First, Santa is practically our neighbor. Second, we provide gifts to over 500 native kids here in Greenland and to ensure that the gifts make it to all the villages takes a long time. For the most part, there are no roads or rail by which we can ship the gifts, everything has to go by air or sea. This time of year sea is no longer an option as the sea continues to ice over with each passing day.

We started Friday evening off with the tree lighting ceremony. This officially began our Julemand Season. Julemand literally means "Christmas Man."

This is only a portion of the gifts that we wrapped. Over the coming weeks they will be distributed across the island by Greenland Air.

Look who visited! Santa came to help supervise our work. Although he was here to ensure we were doing a good job for the children of Greenland, I was still able to put in a good word for Will and Grace.

Saturday we had our official "First Night" Party. We had a very nice buffet dinner followed by a performance by the popular Danish band "Tennis." If you are interested in booking them you can do so by going here. They made an effort to play American music, which included "It's Raining Men" and "YMCA." They lived up to their name, they all wore tennis clothes and ran in to the theme from Rocky, while doing their warm-up routine, as if preparing for a tennis match.

The sun officially set for the last time on Halloween and will not rise again until March. Right now we have about 3-4 hours of a dawn/dusk cycle. By December we should be fully dark all the time. If you look in the picture of the tree lighting you can see that the light on the horizon is about all we get at this point.

I have no explanation for this picture, other than to say it was in the bathroom of the building where our First Night Party was. I am not sure if these signs are common in Europe or Denmark. I imagine, as with all signs, this one was created as a result of someone trying to do each of the things pictured. I will confess that I did violate the rule depicted in the upper right-hand corner of this sign, but I do not plan to be fishing in a toilet anytime soon.