We had a white Christmas, barely, with grass poking through the thin snow. All of that is gone now and we are having a very slippery and wet New Year’s Eve. The snow is melting but ground is still mostly frozen so there is nowhere for the water to go. The sloping, hilly streets of the old parts of Spånga are mostly ice-free, but the parks are difficult.

I actually had a wish list for Christmas this year, with a single thing on it: I wished for Ingrid to paint a picture for me.

We have two large emptyish walls, and I’ve never found any picture that I’ve felt strongly enough about to want to put there. I was thinking of ordering a Chinese reproduction of some famous painting, and even had an actual shortlist. Then I realized that I have an artist right here in the house, who could make an original work for me, which would be so much more special. Ingrid kindly obliged. I couldn’t be happier with the result.

The wall had been empty for years. Now that there is one painting there, it’s kind of asking for more, isn’t it? Perhaps I can wish for another painting for my birthday.

We took Nystagmus to a vet clinic for a vaccination top-up, and for some weight and diet advice.

The vaccination he didn’t even notice. As for his weight, it turns out that he’s just a little bit overweight, not as much as he looks – his belly pouch is bigger than average, for a cat of his age, and makes him look fatter than he is. But he could still do with a little less fat around his ribs. So we’ll keep feeding him as we have been, and following up his weight.

The trip was also good crate training. Nysse doesn’t mind his crate at all, actually jumps in voluntarily, but he mewled quite pitifully when we started driving. His last trip must have been a bit traumatizing, with being uprooted from his home and taken to a new one. I guess he feared something similar might happen this time. Hopefully we can teach him that crates and car rides don’t have to be bad things.

Nysse vs the neighbourhood cat. Whose name is Morris, by the way – he deserves to be called by his proper name.

After Nysse moved in, Morris doesn’t dare come in any more. He was always a cautious one – it took weeks before he came close enough to be touched. Now he comes to the door, I open it for him, he pokes his head in – and then he sees Nysse and backs out again. Then he sits and looks at Nysse, who looks back at him. After a few minutes, Morris gives up and slinks away, looking defeated.

He’s been by several times since Nysse came. Nysse looks more confident each time; I’m not sure about Morris. He hasn’t given up yet. I had hoped they might be friends, or at least coexist peacefully, but maybe not.

I want to thank everybody who sent us Christmas cards this year, even though I forgot.

One card stood out because of the envelope it arrived in – a Soviet-era envelope from 1987, with a New Year’s Eve celebratory design. Complete with boxes for filling in the postal code in a standard way, down at the bottom left. (The flap of the envelope has examples of all ten digits, so that the boxes get filled in correctly.) The boxes for postal code have existed for as long as I can remember, and clearly at least since 1987, so I guess they had OCR for sorting mail already back then?

There was officially no Christmas in Soviet Estonia, since Christmas and everything else with Christian roots was a despicable remnant of bourgeois mores and thus Not Done. We nevertheless celebrated Christmas in our home, on the quiet, and so did many other households.

Official midwinter celebrations were all for the New Year. Apart from the name and the date, it was very similar to Christmas, though… with decorated trees with baubles and lights, gingerbread cookies, and a bearded man bringing gifts. The bearded man was Ded Moroz, Father Frost, who was usually clothed in blue rather than red, and whose sled was pulled by three horses rather than a bunch of reindeer, but who otherwise functioned very much like Santa Claus. (TIL that even Ded Moroz was too bourgeois and was banned after the Bolshevik revolution in 1917, but brought back a few decades later.)

In Estonian, Ded Moroz was not called Father Frost or külmataat, but näärivana, because he fused with not only Christmas but also the old Estonian New Year’s traditions, called näärid. Fun fact for you: näärid have their roots in Scandinavian traditions, and the word itself comes from the Swedish nyår, “new year”.

My mum came by for Christmas. She can be fun. But in large amounts I find her exhausting.

We finally brought home a Christmas tree. We’ve never been this late and this lax with the Christmas preparations. For the first time in years I didn’t even remember to send any Christmas cards. Sorry, folks. At leat we’ve bought gifts for the kids.

Nysse used to live together with two other cats. When food was served, he was fast and pushy, and always got more than his fair share. Since he was living in the countryside, he probably supplemented the cat food with mice and voles and such as well. Now he’s visibly overweight.

We serve him food according to his weight, and there’s nowhere to get any extras, since he’s staying indoors for now. And he is not happy with this new situation. Add the usual cat curiosity to the mix, and you get a cat that is very, very interested in our food. He jumps up on the kitchen table and the counters while we’re cooking or eating, and tries to steal bites of whatever he can find. We keep shooing him down, but I expect it’s going to take a long while for him to learn that those places are off-limits.

And of course he seizes the opportunity when we’re not in the kitchen keeping an eye on things. No dinner ingredient or half-eaten sandwich or butter lid can be left unguarded. We’ve never been so disciplined about putting any kitchen clutter away immediately.

When he can’t get hold of anything else, he licks the edges of unwashed dishes in the sink.