aoch...

this stair gave me 

this bruise 

but I promise the stair is way worse right now - covered in snow and ice. aaand you should know that I fell down the whoooole way ! 

Winter in Sweden

exclusive for you few who reads my blog , winter pics from sweden ! 

Swedish Christmas

The Baking

The christmas in Sweden starts of for real the Saturday before First advent, with “the yearly Christmas preparations”. The mothers with help from their children bake gingerbread biscuits, “Lucia Buns”, toffees, caramel and other Christmas candies. Closer to Christmas Eve we also make a “gingerbread biscuit house”. It’s really neat, because we do different houses every year, we did a church once, and last year we did our summer house (the picture).

Decoration

We also start to decorate the house with brownies or young pucks, stars, angels, and most important advent candlesticks and advent stars that are suppose to remind us about the star of Bethlehem. The day before Christmas Eve we take the Christmas tree inside and decorate it.

Advent

At First advent (usually the first Sunday in December) we have a advent coffee, eating the Christmas candy we baked the day before and light one of the candles of the advent candlestick. We do this the fourth Sundays before Christmas Eve, light one more candle each time, so the last Sunday before Christmas Eve all four candles are lightened.

Everyday in December before Christmas Eve the children are watching this show called “The Christmas calendar” at TV, it’s a show with a new episode everyday, and the final episode is shown at Christmas Eve. There is also a thing called “Advent Calendar” that is popular by children. It’s a calendar with 24 “doors” that represent the 24 four days in December before Christmas Eve, under each door there’s a picture, or in some kind a piece of chocolate or a small gift.

Lucia

At December 13 we celebrate Lucia. Lucia was a girl born year 280 in Sicilian that became a Saint.

We celebrate it through having a “procession of Lucia” led by a girl that suppose to be Lucia, she is most often very beautiful and has long blond hair, she wears a white dress with a red ribbon tide round her waist, in her hair she has a crown with candles. After her there’s a group of attendants, they have white dresses, another sort of ribbon round their waist and a ribbon or a wreath in their hair, they hold a candle in their hand. The boys are called “star boys” or boy attendants to Lucia, they also have a sort of white dress, and a “top hat” decorated with stars and a stick with a star on it. Sometimes there’s also some “gingerbread biscuits men” and young pucks that walks in the very end of the “procession of Lucia”. How ever, they walk slowly in to the room and sings songs about Lucia, “the star boys” and the young pucks. It’s very beautiful, the best ones are at churches, but if you have children you will probably go to their school or preschool and see their performance.

After or during the performance the “Lucia Buns” and gingerbread biscuits will be served, and usually when we eat this things we drink coffee, tea or hot chocolate.

Drinks

The most typical Christmas drink in Sweden is “Glögg” or mulled wine, it’s a hot drink, made of heated wine, sugar and spices and it’s served with almonds and raisins. For the kids there’s one without alcohol. We drink these before dinners, to our “Lucia buns” at the afternoon, and it’s also common with “Glögg parties”, where people meat just to drink this and have a good time, and it makes you warm after a walk in the snow.

Other common drinks during Christmas are Christmas beer, a Christmas soft drink that is called “Christmas must” and snaps. The adults drink snaps for the Christmas dinner and sings drinking songs typical for Christmas.

Christmas Eve

So of course, the most important day, Christmas Eve, in Sweden we don’t celebrate Christmas at Christmas Day as you do.

What people do on Christmas Eve are usually pretty much the same, but it’s very different in which order you do it, hand how you do it, all depends on family tradition, how patient the children are. So I’m just going to tell you about how a Christmas Eve usually looks like in The Lundgren Family.

Usually we spend the Christmas holiday in Southern Sweden with my dad’s family, and the only boring thing about that is that they don’t get any snow there. But except that I love it!

I wake up around 9 o’clock, classic or Christmas music is played in the stereo and there’s lightened candles everywhere and it looks really pretty. -Candles during the winter in Sweden are by the way very common though it’s so dark. In northern Sweden the sun is only shining for an hour. –

Last year we went to a early Christmas-morning service at church, but we normally don’t do that, it’s not very common to go to church in Sweden anymore, it was more common back in the days. But it was pretty neat.

Any ways, in our family it’s kind of a tradition that everyone gets a book or a magazine in the morning of Christmas Eve, just to have something to kill time with during the day.

Around 11 o’clock the whole family (my family and my uncles family) goes on a long walk, we usually walk for an hour or so. It’s really neat, when we are at home in Stockholm we walk in the forest and there’s a lot of snow, so it’s all pretty, in southern Sweden we walk on a small mountain, over the fields and the hills, no snow, but still very pretty.

When we come home from the walk we eat rice pudding, or “rice porridge”, it’s served with milk, cinnamon and sugar. As a tradition there’s an almond in the pudding, and who ever gets the almond have to make a rime about the food, or in some families will get married during the next year, it’s just different for what family tradition you have.

At three o’clock the whole family sits down together at the TV to watch “Donald Ducks Christmas”. It’s a show that is every year at Christmas, showing parts from old classic Disney movies, and every year they show a quick view from some new animated movie. While we sit there we eat our Christmas candy and drink “Glögg”.

Donald Ducks Christmas is very important to most Swedes; it’s almost a crime if you don’t watch it.

Around six o’clock we start to eat dinner that is called “Christmas smorgasbord” or “Christmas Table”. It’s a buffet / smorgasbord of Swedish Meatballs, small frying sausage, spareribs, herring, ham, potatoes, crispbread, “Jansson’s Temptation”, and every family have something special, my dad’s family have a potato cake with cumin and other spices, and my mom’s family eats pig feet in jelly (pretty gross to be honest).

For desert we eat a biscuit made of sugar, butter and flour, and we eat this with melted and sweeten cloudberries or raspberries and whipped cream.

After the dinner that always takes a long time we sit down round the Christmas tree and start to give each other Christmas presents. But we only give one gift at time, to one person, so everybody can se what it is.

At all Christmas presents there’s a rime that the person who’s giving the present have been written about the gift, and then the person who gets the present have to guess what it is. That is really fun! Everybody in my family writes really good rimes.

When all presents are opened it’s usually really late at night and everybody is exhausted

Santa Claus

Santa Claus doesn’t come through the chimney in Sweden, he comes to everybody’s home and knocks on the door with a bag of presents, and then he comes inside and hand out the gifts to everyone.

In my dad’s family I’m the youngest child so we don’t have Santa Clause coming to us anymore, but when I was younger my dad always, for some reason, was out buying the newspaper when Santa Claus came.

It ain’t over ‘til it’s over.

Christmas is not over yet though.

The Celebration will keep on going at Christmas Day and the day after Christmas Day with walks, “glögg”, dinners and more Christmas candy with all friends and relatives.

hello again

I suck at this..
I've been away all christmas, 22 days in asia. It was amazing. I will tell you everything another time. During my stay in US I wrote two assignments in Floral Design that might interest you. One is a cock book, the other one is about Swedish Christmas.
So I'll just copy paste. Don't have time to read through it now so I do apologize for spelling and grammar mistakes.

miss you muches