This year’s Nobel prize winners received their awards in Stockholm (Sweden) on Saturday, Dec. 10, 2011.  Simon Frantz, a former senior editor of Nobelprize.org and current blogger at Nobel Prize Watch, offered six tips to Nobel Laureates for surviving the festivities in a Dec. 8, 2011 posting on the Guardian science blogs,

3. Enjoy being a celebrity

Photographers and autograph hunters line up outside the Grand Hotel eager to catch a glimpse of laureates as they are whisked in and out of their limos. The 2009 medicine laureate Elizabeth Blackburn recalls the autograph hunters jostling and even fighting outside the hotel for prized signatures. Fellow 2009 medicine laureate Carol Greider says her son was more concerned that she was signing too many autographs, in case it would affect their price on eBay.

Even laureates who consider themselves to be anonymous in their own institutions are recognised on the streets, thanks to the constant TV and press coverage of the scientists and their achievements.

That tip was one of my favourites and inspired this posting’s title. Here’s something I never suspected about the actual prize-giving night,

5. Pace yourself … it’s going to be a long night

After the Nobel prize ceremony, it’s straight to a banquet at the City Hall, which is undoubtedly the social event of the year in Sweden. Invitations for the 1,300 seats are like gold dust. Swedish families gather around their TVs at home to follow proceedings live.

Laureates and their family members are interviewed as they enter the building. TV style pundits rate ladies’ fashions, as do the daily newspapers the following day. Food pundits rate the food being served, which has been created by 45 chefs, delivered by 260 servers, and washed down with 400 bottles of champagne and 400 bottles of red wine.

…

Once the traditional ice-cream dessert has been tabled, and the banquet speeches have been made by a laureate (usually the eldest) from each prize area, the diners make their way upstairs for a spot of dancing and the laureates are granted an audience with the royal family.

But that’s far from being the end of the evening. There’s a special after-show party called the Nobel Nightcap, hosted by a different university in Stockholm each year, where laureates, banquet guests and students mingle until the wee hours. [emphasis mine]

Here’s one last tip,

… it’s worth staying a few days longer, because on the morning of 13 December things become much more informal and surreal. Laureates are woken up in their hotel beds by girls dressed in white carrying candles, celebrating the feast of St Lucia, the patron saint of light and vision who illuminates the midwinter darkness.

These tips shed a whole new light on winning a Nobel prize.