Christmas is almost here. Ingrid, Adrian and I decorated the tree today; Nysse watched with great interest.

Then I made mince pies.

In the past I’ve mostly stayed out of this project – Eric was always the master baker, and my mother sometimes came here for a Christmas baking session, so there wasn’t room or need for me to get involved. They always made it seem very tricky: the filling bubbled out of the pie, the edges didn’t stay closed. Either I was lucky, or I somehow absorbed their learnings by osmosis – my first attempt came out great. Not picture perfect – there was a little bit of leakage – but much better than I expected, based on watching them work.

Christmas party! As one of the newly-joined employees this year, I was roped into the party committee. Which really didn’t involve much more than a brainstorming session for finding a theme. After that, our new office assistant took over, because it turned out that organizing a party is one of her favourite activities, and she wasn’t very interested in offloading any tasks to the rest of us. Until this afternoon, when I got to hang up balloons and other decorations.

It didn’t look like much in strong lamplight but felt quite festive with added disco lighting.

And here’s my alien costume! There were a few more aliens in the party crowd, and three Edgar the Bugs.

Christmas baking day with my brother.

The kids were here but had other things to do. I think they have kind of outgrown much of Christmas. Some bits are important still, but others matter much less than they used to.

It feels like my brother did all the hard work – the kneading and the rolling – while I just brought out ingredients and tools, put things in and out of the oven, and tidied away the dishes and utensils. He did volunteer for all of it, and he did go home with a nice stack of lussebullar as well as gingerbread cookies, so I don’t feel like I took advantage of him too much.

The lussebullar we made based on an online recipe described as “the ultimate”, with 294 votes (averaging at 4.5 stars) and 174 gushingly positive comments. There were no special ingredients involved – just preparation, and attention to detail. It starts with a pre-ferment the night before, has you soak both the saffron and the raisins (separately) etc.

In our not-very-warm house the dough needed a lot more time to rise than the recipe suggested, more like three hours instead of one. Once they were in the oven, they came out absolutely perfect: fluffy and tender. I agree with all the positive comments on the recipe and have already saved it for next year.

The gingerbread cookie dough was hard to work with at first, but settled down with time. Some sources advise trying to keep the dough cool; our dough worked better when it had time to warm up a bit. The cookies had a lot of flavour but were not quite as crispy as I would want, so the recipe is not yet perfect enough for sharing.

For Adrian, I continue our tradition of daily chocolate toffees from Åre Chokladfabrik – a mixture of their Christmas toffees, saffron toffees, and salted caramel toffees. Except this year I only fill the pockets for every other week.

Ingrid asked for something weekly instead – daily sweets would be too much sugar, and daily anything would be too much to keep up with. So she gets a classical Christmas-themed short story and a Christmas-themed loose-leaf tea every Sunday in advent.

I occasionally vaguely consider giving myself an advent calendar of my own – there are even yarn advent calendars – but always decide against it. I generally don’t want more stuff in my life, and the stuff do I buy, I’m picky about. I buy with purpose. Random yarn, no matter how pretty, would be wasted on me. Chocolates, cheeses, liqueur… yarn, seeds, whatever – same. Something like the short stories that I got for Ingrid would possibly be the only exception.

First advent Sunday.

I hung up advent stars inside, and another light garland on the front porch, and sprinkled miscellaneous Christmas stuff here and there. Now the house feels very Christmas-y. As long as I don’t look outside, where it’s +8°C and rain.

We had glögg and advent fika after dinner. Haven’t had time to bake anything Christmas-themed yet – somehow the hanging up of lights took hours – so we have fika from Spånga Konditori. A saffron bun for Adrian, and cakes with saffron curd and vanilla pannacotta and a lingonberry glaze for Ingrid and myself.

Tomorrow is the first Sunday of Advent and it’s time to get the Christmas mood going. Tomorrow is also going to be rainy, so I’m starting with the outdoor lights today.

The thuja in the garden is perfectly placed for Christmas lighting, nicely visible from the whole living room and at just the right distance. What it is not, is perfectly shaped for hanging Christmas lights. It’s very much directed upwards, not like a spruce or a fir with rounds of nearly-horizontal branches, and its boughs are quite delicate. I’ve figured out something of a technique that doesn’t bend the branches and gives an aesthetically pleasing result. It’s a hassle, involving a stepladder which I need to move several times, and a garden fork as an arm extender to allow me to hook the lights over the branches, and even then it takes me several tries for each loop.

When I had done all the work and was all sweaty and a mixture of pleased and frustrated, and put the plug in, I discovered that only about half the garland was lighting up. The rest was dark. It’s daylight, you can’t see the lights very well in the photo, but there are eight vertical lines and only four of them are lighting up.

I had plugged it in while it was still in the box, specifically to avoid wasting my time hanging up something that was not working. But the top layer in the box looked good, and enough of it lit up to give the impression of everything working, and I thought it would be an all-or-nothing situation, so I didn’t even think to check further in.

Now I had to take everything down again, do research to find a new garland, drive somewhere to pick it up, and go through the whole ladder-fork-cable exercise again. Because the alternatives – having to look at sad, broken Christmas lights, or having to put up the new ones in the rain tomorrow, or not having any lights at all for the first Advent Sunday – were even worse.

Got it done in the end, with much huffing and sighing, so now Christmas can start.

The process would be a lot easier if I had more arms. Or maybe if I had a different tool. The garden fork is big and heavy and requires two hands. If I had something lighter, I could have one in each hand, which would make it much easier to put the garland where I want it to go. With one extended hand, I’m just sort of half-shoving, half-throwing it up and hoping that it will catch on a bough. With two, I could maybe actually shape it into an arch. Hmm.

Today was the first day warm enough for the team at Sortera to have lunch outside in the sun on the quay.

Today was also the day I found a last, lost, lonely lussebulle in a corner of the freezer. Still tasted good.