Tiske and Taske

Recently, two elves visited our apartment twice from Max and Lilja's school. Their names are Tiske and Taske and they came one night for Lilja and one night for Max. These visits are apparently a Christmas tradition here in Denmark for kids under six.

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Actually, its hard to take two steps in Denmark without tripping over a Danish Christmas tradition! They've got a lot of them. Although, I had one Dane tell me that Denmark is not nearly as crazy about Christmas as Germany is. Apparently, Germans go all out for this holiday.

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Tiske and Taske are rather mischievous and like to hide things and otherwise play tricks on the children that they are visiting. For instance, last night, Tiske and Taske were visiting Max and they hid the chocolate chip cookies that he and Leysia had made the previous day. It took Max quite some time to find the cookies, eventually discovering that Tiske and Taske had hid them behind the microwave in the kitchen.

After the hijinks are done, it is the parent's responsibility to document the events by writing a story that is read to all of the kids at their children's kindergarden. I, of course, took my responsibility very seriously and produced two reports that the kids took with them when returning Tiske and Taske the next day.

For posterity, here are the reports that I made for Max and Lilja and their adventures with Tiske and Taske:

• Lilja
• Max

Enjoy,

Ken

P.S. Note: these files are large (7.2MB and 8.7 MB) PDF files that may take a while to download. Some Web browsers can display PDF files directly; others will simply download the file and you will then need to view them using Adobe's Acrobat Reader or MacOS X's Preview application.