Vårsalongen, “The Spring Salon”, is an annual art event where anyone in Sweden can send in their works to be considered for inclusion. The result is always eclectic and varied. The works range from paintings, drawings and sculpture to video installations, and more. This year all the works can be seen online.

I was happy to see quite a few pieces of textile art, even though I didn’t particularly like any one of them. Another memorable works this year was Vintern 2021/22 by Mårten the dog, which consisted of all the gloves and mittens that the artist had carried home from his walks during one season.

Ingrid is a budding artist and it wasn’t hard to convince her to come with us, and Eric is always up for art exhibitions. Adrian was perhaps a bit less enthusiastic, but I was pretty sure even he would enjoy it. The exhibition is so democratic and relatable – there’s even a “Young Spring Salon” section for sixteen to eighteen-year-olds – that there’s always something for everyone.

Predictably, Adrian enjoyed the sculptures the most. When given a choice, he always prefers to work three-dimensionally, whether with paper or clay or Legos.

Liljevalchs was recently expanded and now has several new galleries which I hadn’t visited before. The upstairs ones had amazing ceilings.

Those galleries currently exhibited works by Jockum Nordström, whose graphical works I didn’t find particularly interesting. But his mobile sculptures were nice: agglomerations of objects and pieces of wood, with a weight attached to a rotating arm of metal wire, and something noise-making for that weight to hit on each pass around the circle: a zither, or a broken violin, or a bicycle bell.

Afterwards we had lunch at Liljevalchs’ new vegetarian restaurant. The food wasn’t bad but they were badly understaffed so we waited a long time for our food, only to find out that they had lost half of our order, so half of us had to re-order and wait again.

It’s a few degrees below zero outside and I’m wrapping myself in a scarf and buttoning up my wool coat. Adrian, meanwhile, has a thin windproof jacket over his sweater and doesn’t even close it because he likes the feeling of freedom. Just looking at him makes me shiver.

I tried photographing him while we were walking, but it was hard to get any distance. Naturally, as we walk together and talk together, he quickly gravitates closer to me.

Birthday fika for Eric’s sister who turned 50.

The adults sat and talked and ate semla. Those too young to appreciate sitting and talking had a Lego Masters competition. Those too young for Legos hung around and explored the world.

Here’s a rhinoceros that Adrian built.

Adrian bought this pair of socks in Amsterdam, in early November. That’s three months ago. Say he has enough socks to last him two weeks between doing laundry. He’d then have worn these six days at most. How can he already have a fingertip-sized hole in them? Does he walk on sandpaper? Have small piles of gravel in his shoes?

I haven’t been out walking since September. As these things tend to go during the dark and gray months of November and December (with Christmas also distracting). But today was forecast to be a rare bright and sunny day so Adrian and I went out walking on Järvafältet.

The weather has been wet for some time and it rained a lot during the night, so we mostly stuck to wide, well-maintained paths. The smaller, wilder trails are usually more fun, but they were very muddy today.


We did get sunshine for most of our walk. Later when the clouds came, Adrian was a rare speck of colour in an otherwise pretty dull-coloured landscape.

We had to give up on our shortcut path across one of the fields halfway, when we realized it was flooded and impassable.

Lake Säbysjön, which our walk circled around, was still all iced over, even though we’ve had quite a lot of above-zero days recently.

There were some brave skaters on the ice, and a short time later an entire group of them passed us, more than a dozen people. I guess the ice is more solid than it looks, all wet and watery though it is.

For our lunch break we stopped at the birding tower on the southwest shore of the lake. We couldn’t spot any birds, but there was a lonely ice fisher. That’s that little black and white dot to the right of the middle. He was quite interesting to watch. I thought he’d just sit at his hole all the time, but he had multiple holes that he moved between, and even drilled a new one.

After a few hours the introverts start taking off into various corners, while the extroverts could happily keep going all night.

The annual gingerbread house competition and exhibition at the Museum of Architecture and Design.

The competition, open to anyone, has a different theme every year. This year’s theme was “Around the corner”, and the contestants had interpreted it in every possible way: some very literal, some more figurative, and some had probably shoehorned whatever they had built into the theme after the fact. There were a lot of labyrinths (with lots of corners) and houses with round corners or no corners. For some reason there were several houses built around the four seasons (maybe because houses tend to have four corners?)

The competition is divided into three categories: experts (architects, designers and bakers); under 12; and everyone else. This year many of the most interesting and impressive contributions came from the “everyone else” group. The winner of the expert category was, in fact, strikingly bland and boring. (I didn’t even waste a photo on it.)


In recent years, I’ve noticed works on the theme of how we’re destroying nature, how we need to be kinder to the Earth, and how a more sustainable future is just around the corner. I wonder if the share of works on this topic is on an upward trend.

Usually we start piling up the gifts under the tree the day before Christmas Eve but Nysse was all over the presents as soon as they started turning up, with claws and teeth, so we had to hide them away in the bedroom behind a closed door and only brought them out last minute. Only one or two packages got slightly chewed in the corners.

I am kind of proud of how I managed to wrap a large potted plant for Ingrid without breaking anything.

Lunch was the traditional devilled eggs, served with herring and an orange-avocado-feta-pistacho sallad, and vörtbröd.

Ingrid made a cream cheese Christmas tree for a starter. I didn’t think of taking any photos of the rest of the dinner, which consisted of the bean balls I always make for Christmas, potato gratin, brussel sprouts and a lingonberry sauce. I had planned for a cranberry sauce but there were no cranberries to be had in any of the three supermarkets I tried, neither fresh nor frozen. Lingonberries with orange peel didn’t taste half bad either.

We decorated gingerbread cookies. Ingrid and I decorated hearts and trees and pigs. Adrian made bleeding sharks, stitched-up crocodiles, and Frankenstein’s monster with parts of different gingerbread men glued together.


Then he went on to even more innovative creations, like a two-headed giraffe, a tangle of teddy bears, and 3D dolphins.

In the evening we decorated the tree. Unpacking the decorations is the best part: “remember when we got this one!” and “oh, I’d forgotten about this one”.