You know what is more frustrating than having to rip up several days worth of knitting because you got the gauge wrong?

Having to rip up several days worth of knitting because you used the wrong yarn.

I made swatches with several different yarns and then picked one combination and ordered enough for a whole cardigan. Unfortunately the alpaca yarn I left in the knitting basket was not the one I had decided to use. And I discovered this when I had knitted most of the first ball of yarn.

The ceremonial smashing of the gingerbread house.

Swenglish happens when a Swede speaks English with a pronunciation that leans towards Swedish patterns, and uses Swedish idioms directly translated into English.

Svengelska happens when a Swede speaks Swedish but using a lot of (unnecessary) anglicisms.

Adrian and Ingrid (and especially Adrian) have come up with a third, new blend of Swedish and English: pronouncing Swedish words the way they might be pronounced in English. With a bit of luck and creativity, they find words that actually do exist in English, or sound like they might. So they can turn dator (computer) into day tour or perhaps detour; rågkaka (rye cake) becomes rogue cay-cay; julgran becomes yowl grain.

Then wrap it in some more English and Swedish: Can I use your day tour obviously means “can I use your computer”. Or maten är klar (“the food is done”, i.e. dinner is ready) can become the mat is clear which obviously means something very different.

And I guess none of this probably makes any sense to you at all unless you speak both Swedish and English…

Sometimes I understand what they say, especially in small amounts. But occasionally one of them says something in this Swedish-English mixture, and the other kid replies – so they obviously understood it – while I stand there and have no clue what they just said.

With all the Christmas scarves, socks and mittens done (yes, the scarf was also a gift) I can start a new project, which will be the black cardigan I’ve been wanting to have for many months now.

Starting a large knitting project is scary. Despite all the measuring and gauge swatches, I have no real confidence in my ability to get the sizing right. Gauge swatches are so much smaller than cardigans that every measurement error gets magnified by a factor of 10.

It takes a long while for the errors to become really apparent in the real thing. Right now the cardigan is just a curled-up ribbon of knitting. If I gently pull at it a little bit in one direction, or another, its size can seem completely different.

Keep knitting and hope for the best.

Winter, you say? Nah. We don’t seem to be doing winters any more.

This thing has been flowering since July. We’ve had a very few frosty nights, but not enough to kill the flowers.

I finished the Christmas mittens in time. Now that they have been unwrapped, I can safely post full photos here!

Raspberry red for Adrian, black for Ingrid.

Funnily enough both of them like the same colour combination but with different emphasis. Adrian picked out the red and blue yarn (without knowing what they were for) and Ingrid happened to show me her favourite desktop wallpaper which was mostly black with details in the same cool red and blue tones.

Adrian immediately started using his, even before I had woven in all the yarn ends (which I didn’t do in advance because I wanted them to try them on). Ingrid hasn’t worn hers yet. Perhaps she thinks she doesn’t need mittens any more. In which case I guess hers will become Adrian’s in a few years.

Working from home, I wear woollen socks a lot more. Working in the office I’d wear indoor shoes instead but socks are so much comfier. Which leads to a lot more darning.

A nice thing about hand-knitted socks is that I can fix a hole before it actually becomes a hole. The yarn wears thin but still retains the knitted structure, and I can use duplicate stitch to reinforce it. On this sock my reinforcement even covers up an earlier, less-than-expert darning.

Store-bought socks have their benefits but they are usually made of such thin yarn that duplicate stitching them would take a magnifying glass and one of those surgery robots that repeat your hand movements in miniature.

This, of course, assumes that I notice the soon-to-be hole in time, and don’t procrastinate about fixing it until it does actually become a hole.

There was no hope we would get a white Christmas this year, but it did actually start to snow late on Christmas Eve. The snowfall continued today and by the evening there was enough for Ingrid to go out with her friends for sledding and a snowball fight. It was lovely to see. The world was so much brighter.

It’s almost like back when we lived in London. Whenever it snowed (which it did a handful of times during our nearly 8 years there) there was always a big hoopla – “come look, bring your camera, it’s snowing!” I guess this might be the new normal here as well.

Some people try to make climate change seem like a good thing for Sweden – a longer growing season, and who wants all that winter anyway. But even if you don’t want all that winter snow and ice, a warmer climate won’t make our winters any sunnier, or the winter days any longer. Stockholm may get the winter temperatures that London currently has (or whatever continental city the forecasts point to) but climate change will not magically move Stockholm to London’s latitude. Instead of bright snowy days we will have more dark wet days.

We had Christmas gifts, somewhat too much Christmas food, and a new batch of gingerbread cookies.

I enjoy the run-up to Christmas more than Christmas Eve itself. Advent has all the good stuff – the lights, the decorations, the baking and then the eating of the baking – without the nearly hectic, keyed-up quality of Christmas itself. Christmas is tiring. Adrian is over-hyped about presents. My mum needs entertaining all day long, so I must keep up an even stream of activities and conversation, but only talk about topics that I don’t really care about because the odds are that I’ll get a snippy negative reply back.

(Ingrid took this photo.)

The first gifts have materialized under the tree, and Adrian can barely contain his excitement. Or rather, he cannot. He can not shut up about the gifts, to the point that I am getting very fed up with it.

Two of the gifts have his name on them, and he is guessing at what might be in there. He set a rule for himself that he today can only look at the gifts, not pick them up to weigh them or shake them. That’s only allowed on Christmas Eve.

But he allowed himself to hold up other things to the wrapped packages to compare their sizes. Look, one is suspiciously similar in size to a Nintendo Switch game sleeve (and Pokemon Sword is at the top of his list), while another matches a series of comic books where we have books 1 and 2, and book 3 has recently been published.