Nysse, owning my sewing pile.

Getting out the Christmas cards in time this year. I buy them in good time, and I know I want to send them, and then December arrives and I get caught up in other things. This year, though: calendar reminders, and Ingrid’s help.

We had the tretton37 Christmas party tonight, at Moderna Museet. Very modern food, too: the meat-eaters got everything from deer heart to chicken liver mousse. The herring and the vegetarian mains were delicious, and I hear that those who got past the shock of the menu all enjoyed the food as well.

Party photos are not my thing, and posting photos of other people here without their consent is even less my thing, so here’s a view of the Christmas tree in Gamla Stan across the water.

Embroidery club. Theme of the day: marking/signing your work. We’re not done (this is square 6 out of 9) but it is the last time we meet up for this year, so it feels appropriate, somehow.

Plus Christmas fika.

–16°C and the air is full of ice crystals. Every light at the construction site in Spånga is giving off light pillars.

Christmas lights, welcoming us home.

They also make the first step out of the house in the morning quite a bit nicer.

Winter came early this year, and hard. We’ve got plenty of snow and temperatures have been at –10°C or colder. For the first time since forever, we have enough snow for skiing in Stockholm in December.

I took a few hours off work this afternoon and went skiing on Järvafältet. It was perfect. A cold Monday afternoon, almost no people. Fresh snow, and tracks in good shape.

Out skiing in –10°C, I was warmer than I am at home at +17°C. There wasn’t a single moment when I was cold, even though I was wearing about as much as I do when I sit home on the sofa.

My phone was less happy in the cold. It died, showing me a distressed yellow warning triangle with a thermometer icon, before I finished my circuit. Which was a bit of a problem, because it had my photos of the map of tracks. The map was only posted in a handful of locations, and I knew there were none in the north-west corner of the area. The tracks follow the terrain and are nowhere near regular or predictable in shape. But most of the time there wasn’t much choice, just follow the tracks, so I found my way back even without the maps.

Not one I made!

I wear a lot of wool during the really cold months. My own knitting energy comes and goes – I can make maybe two cardigans per season. I could buy, and I would buy, if I could find anything that I actually like, but most wool cardigans and sweaters are very expensive without being very beautiful. I search second-hand stores a lot, but the experience can be hit and miss. I found this lovely sweater, 100% wool, made in Ireland. But when I unpacked it and tried it on, it turned out to be much smaller than the size label indicated. Normal sleeve length for a ladies’ garment is around 55 or 60 cm; this one measured 45. Probably shrunk due to careless washing by a previous owner. Sad.