Forget elephants and donkeys...

After staying up to watch election results (the networks called it around 5 a.m. here) on Tuesday, I returned home, excited but exhausted, and received congratulations from my host parents. They have been following the American election almost as closely as I have: any time the Danish public TV station, DR, would have a program about the election we would watch it together. Breakfasts are also always a recap of the night's political news.

When I returned home Wednesday afternoon, I found the following on my desk:


I thought, "Oh, that's nice. Solveig (my host Mom) must have gotten some roses or something and gave me one."

But that evening, when she asked what I thought of the rose, she told me that it actually had a great deal of significance. The rose represents the Democratic (well, actually Denmark's Social Democratic) Party. Instead of animals, each political party in Denmark has a flower. For the Social Democratic Party, it is a rose, and Solveig said that whenever your party wins (my host family are Social Democrats), you get your party's flower. The woman at the flower shop didn't know what the American Democratic Party's flower was (rightly so), so she thought that the Social Democratic Party (which, like most Danish parties, aligns fairly well to the Democrats) was a good choice.

Sure, without an animal mascot, my bumper sticker from high school ("Democrats are sexy... Who ever heard of a nice piece of elephant?") wouldn't have been possible, but I'm going to say that I'd much rather have flowers represent our political parties. Dibs on the rose.