skoal! Piling the table high with Christmas angels and aquavit, Helena Christensen and Leif Sigersen prepare a cozy and bright Danish smorgasbord.

Byline: William Norwich

While the models-are-too-thin debate was revived points elsewhere, Helena Christensen was in her kitchen cooking.

Even in her most junior modeling days, Helena-who is also an actress and photographer, having most recently shot Bono's antipoverty One campaign-has always championed the pleasures and practicalities of glorious food, whether it is a vegetable soup for her young son, a stovetop chicken-and-goat-cheese tajine for an impromptu dinner party, or something hearty to bring to a cuisine-challenged friend.

Today, an unseasonably warm afternoon, Helena is at home in Manhattan's West Village overseeing the preparations for a smorgasbord, the traditional winter holiday meal in her native Denmark, including the potent potables schnapps (aquavit) and glogg (warmed Burgundy wine mulled with fruit and almond slivers). "We like entertaining because we love decorating and we love eating," Helena says, scattering tiny gold stars from a stationery-store shaker on her dining-room table.

The other half of the "we" to whom she refers is not a romantic connection, although their bond is certainly loving: roommate Leif Sigersen, the celebrated Danish florist and events stylist who is Helena's partner in Butik, a charming women's and children's clothing, accessories, and Danish home-furnishings shop they opened last year at 605 Hudson Street, near West Twelfth in New York.

Helena and Leif's day began at Butik borrowing from its extensive offerings of vintage and new holiday decorations, everything from colorful beads to delicate angels with which to decorate the apartment for the evening's smorgasbord for eight.

At home, basically one large L-shaped room with a terrace, they create magic. "We both collect Christmas decorations, and every year, when our tree goes up, there isn't a dry eye in the house," Helena says, filling small paper baskets at each place setting with buttery Danish cookies and chocolates.