A Copenhagen Christmas

Many people remember one Christmas as quintessential, the holiday that finally, after all those years of lowered and then discarded expectations, didn’t disappoint. ¶ My own gilded Christmas happened by accident, while I was passing through Scandinavia, headed for the Danish island of Funen, where Hans Christian Andersen was born. A snow squall left me stranded in Copenhagen on Dec. 24 and when I woke up Christmas morning and opened my curtains to the blue-black Nordic dawn, I was glad I was stuck.

Outside the dormer windows of my hotel room, flakes were flying everywhere, like a snow dome that had been shook. The slanting red tile roofs of the old city would have done Andersen, or at least one of his more benign fairy tales, proud. As the blizzard kept coming, everything seemed muffled, cushioned in the snowy embrace, but it didn’t really matter. The only sounds would have been the softest ones anyway, only the crunch of the lone girl walking below my window, her blond braid flopping out of a wool cap, her boots leaving a trail through the snow.

This was a Scandinavian idyll — the pearly Arctic light, the toy town sense of calm, a bit of Pippi Longstocking mixed in with a dash of Ingmar Bergman midwinter melancholy. And there was something distinctly Danish about it: the capacity to distill something, even Christmas morning, down to its purest, most elegant essence.

I never left my room that day. But anyone planning a Christmas trip to Copenhagen only has to add the week before or after that hushed Christmas morning to enjoy something more animated, though still quaint enough to simulate a pitstop in Santa’s village. This may come as a surprise.

Copenhagen mostly gets promoted these days as the land of uber-style, all sleek design and chic clubs and adventurous Viking chefs doing molecular things to eight-course tasting menus. And that glossy side does add a hip, grown-up complement to any Danish Christmas trip, especially if you’re looking for a holiday of serious shopping, boutique hotels that earn the name and global dining.

But if you want the unapologetically childlike, old world holiday getaway — more Uncle Olaf and sons than high-tech Bang & Olufsen toys, more roast goose than scallop sashimi, more Christmas market than upmarket — this is the place to come.

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Start with Copenhagen’s biggest claim to whimsical fame, Tivoli Gardens, which remains open through the holiday season. Forget carnival barkers and bumper cars. Opened in 1843 and proof that the Danes can turn even an amusement park into something classy, Tivoli’s 20-acre garden features a Chinese pagoda, a merry-go-round of Viking ships, regular parades of Tivoli boy guards dressed like toy soldiers and an open-air pantomime theater.

If all that isn’t enough of a sweet fantasia, Tivoli adds a snaking Christmas market in December. Running through the garden are rows of garland-draped pastel cottages selling seasonal specialties: peppermint sticks, fur hats, marionettes, waffles laced with apples, and buttery sweet rolls that put the Danish back into danish.

You can easily spend a day or more at Tivoli, but that would mean missing out on too many other Christmas-worthy attractions. Head instead down the pedestrian street Stroget, lined with souvenir shops and design stores, and then veer off into the side streets. These bulge with smaller, beamed, mom and pop antique shops. There you’ll find a haul of old-style stocking stuffers, from folk prints to Flora Danica plates that rate as quite possibly the world’s most beautiful ceramics. Each featuring one hand-painted flower, the plates evoke a distinctly Scandinavian aesthetic; never sentimentalized or prettified, the purple, blue and yellow blossoms in the middle of a bone-white plate are rendered completely, their twisting, muddy roots trailing behind them like an umbilical cord.

If you’re debating between plates, stop at La Glace, a jewel box tea room just off the Stroget, where Copenhagen matrons bundled in big furs treat their granddaughters to cups of hot chocolate and pieces of the classic sportsman’s cake, a dense cloud of whipped cream studded with crumbled nougat.

Then head off to the moated Rosenborg Castle, a fairy tale palace that tops Tivoli’s fantasy grandeur. The 17th-century Dutch Renaissance pile — a jumble of turrets and towers on the outside — comes stuffed inside with an atypically overstated show of Scandinavian loot. There are massive ballrooms, a collection of royal jewels, enough family portraits to chart every genealogical twig of the Danish aristocracy, and one all-mirrored love nest of a bedroom that you’ll have to explain to the kids.

The castle is best seen silhouetted against a winter sky, and as the sun drops fast in December, the sense of Copenhagen’s bittersweet, Nordic beauty stands out starkly.

The skaters in Kongens Kytorv — a central city square, at the base of Stroget, which is iced over in December and turned into an epic rink — shoot past like Olympic contenders. The Nyhavn canal just beyond can resemble a kind of beacon; its 18th-century candy-colored townhouses try to send a little sunny glow through the bruised dusk.

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Hans Christian Andersen fittingly lived in several of these romantic houses (variously at numbers 18, 20 and 67) and while his tales always seem to haunt the city, their sad, elegiac tone feel most vivid in midwinter. The sadness came naturally. Born into rural poverty, the writer constructed stories that are read more as adult existential fables than cuddly lullabies in his home country; maybe the little mermaid comes to us as a Disneyfied sprite, but Andersen’s original crawls hopelessly over a rocky beach toward the prince who disdains her, knowing she’ll be stranded.

The refusal to soften things echoes the gay writer’s own sense of social dislocation as well as a Scandinavian sensibility — the recognition that the sun is going to disappear for long, bleak stretches. But, of course, that sense of gloom also contributes to the Danes’ almost giddy sense of sensual, live-for-the-moment joie de vivre, and it’s the local exuberance that fuels the city’s new sense of stylish elan.

So if old-world Copenhagen starts to border on quaint overkill, drag the kids along on your own adult-sized, trendy day out and sample the city’s well-publicized other side.

The newly hip Vesterbro neighborhood is crammed with boutiques, vintage clothing shops and edgy clubs, but you can do some stylish shopping just as easily back on the Stroget, where the temples to modern Danish design include Georg Jensen silver and the pared-down design classics at Illums Bolighus. Then drop in at one of the doggedly creative restaurants (see “if you go”), where Copenhagen’s chefs engage in a nightly food fight to turn the freshest regional produce into the most surprisingly rarefied dishes. If there is a performance at the city’s glossy new opera house, eat quickly.

The hipster’s day out, though, shouldn’t be your last one in town. Your final day in Copenhagen should be a quiet one that settles back into the snow-cushioned hush of the city, and your last meal should be at Slotskaelderen Hos Gitte Kik, which captures the Danish sense of hygge. Natives have a hard time defining the Danish word, because it evokes layers of almost patriotic feeling. Very loosely translated, hygge means cozy, homey, warm in the midst of the cold. And that, you’ll realize, is exactly what you’ve been feeling since you arrived in Copenhagen — and most purely at Gitte Kik. Specializing in smorrebrod, the open-faced sandwich that qualifies as Denmark’s soul food, the low-lit restaurant is anchored by a big counter lined with sandwiches: roast beef furled around grated horseradish; pork and red cabbage; an exploding fish tank of Baltic shrimp and smoked salmon.

This is all many Danes want for Christmas lunch, but sometimes they place a holiday dessert on the Gitte Kik counter, too. When they do, it is the traditional Danish imperial almond rice pudding, pillowed with whipped cream, and it seems like the best way to finish your last Copenhagen meal. As white as a Baltic snowdrift, the pudding can look almost chilly, but what you taste, when you scoop up a feathery spoonful, is something purely comforting.

Raphael Kadushin is senior aquisitions editor at the University of Wisconsin Press and a contributing editor at Bon Appetit magazine. His travel anthology “Wonderlands” includes a global range of essays.