Saffron buns of the lussebulle model have been a thing for the Christmas season in Sweden for as long as I can remember. Recently they’ve been joined by other kinds of saffron-flavoured baked goods. There are saffron muffins, saffron crescents, and saffron biscuits. This year I’m seeing saffron buns with almond paste at every bakery. Or maybe they’ve been around, and it’s just me who hasn’t noticed them? It’s a delicious combination, in any case.

I thought I’d try to buy more Christmas ornaments. Åhlens, big department store in the middle of Stockholm – surely they will have something.

They had matte, ugly plastic balls. They had ornaments shaped like packages of French fries.

Oh, look, felted bullfinches! Except when I got closer, they looked like diseased, dying bullfinches. Eyes on top of their heads like snails, eyes askew, eyes nearly falling off. Not exactly Christmas vibes. Photos don’t do their ugliness justice, even.

Red and green, wool, hand-made.

The tree this year is dense and voluminous, so our ornaments almost get lost in it. We clearly need more.

We’ve had masses and masses of snow since November, and now – with a week left till Christmas – all of it is gone overnight.

We have a Christmas tree – cat-proofed, even.

Cardigan is done. It’s just the ends left to weave in, and then to find buttons for it.

Our Firefly lamp is losing life, speck by speck.

Christmas cards, ready to be sent off.

Postnord some kind of effort for the holiday season. They make a set of Christmas-themed stamps that cost a tiny bit less than the ordinary ones and are only valid until the 15th of December, and they put up special red post boxes for these.

Today I learned that Postnord and its predecessor Posten have been giving out Christmas stamps since 1980. The price difference vs normal stamps has varied over time, ranging from 5% in 1987 (2.00 kr vs 2.10 kr) to 25% in 1998 (4.00 kr vs 5.00 kr). Currently we’re near the historical minimum, at 7% (14 kr vs 15 kr).

It still annoys me every year that they have no equivalent for international mail. And that they can’t even bother to internationalize the stamps most often used for sending stuff abroad. Motifs with pictures of Swedish cultural artifacts? Sure, go for it. Labelling those in Swedish? Kind of stupid, in my eyes.

Svensk Hemslöjd, “Swedish crafts”, on Norrlandsgatan. It’s an odd shop, selling a mixture of Swedish crafts to mostly tourists, and crafts materials to mostly non-tourists. Right now there’s an explosion of Christmas trinkets filling half the shop, but this place is always a reliable source for nice kitchen textiles like towels and potholders.