We made paper stars.

It’s fun to make Christmas decorations but hard to find place for them. It feels like the house is full of various crafted stars and elves and snowmen and trees, and they just accumulate with the years. The kids make new ones almost every year and don’t ever want to get rid of any of theirs. At least these small paper ones don’t feel like a huge investment so we can throw them out (or rather, recycle them) when Christmas is over.

I enjoy Christmas less and less as the years go by. You say tradition, I say routine. Almost all of Christmas is “should” rather than “want”.

One of the things about Christmas that I do enjoy is cooking and serving semi-fancy dinners. Linen tablecloth, candles, three-course meals with fancy desserts.

Finished wrapping all the Christmas gifts.

Some late night Christmas shopping at MoS. A surprisingly pleasant and stressless shopping experience: the mall is open until 10 pm, and was quite empty late at night. No crowds, no queues. And pretty Christmas light decorations everywhere.

(PS: I ran into a neighbour on Christmas eve and he told me that even then, the shopping streets in central Stockholm were far from crowded. Which is quite different from my experience from previous years. I wasn’t aware that online shopping has made that much of a difference.)

The annual Making of Lussebullar.

Eric enjoys making and kneading the dough.

Ingrid enjoys tasting the dough…

… and making plaited buns.

Adrian got the knack this year of rolling the dough “worms” that you need for making the traditional lussebulle shapes.

Plenty of buns were produced. Since we’re making them quite close to Christmas this year, and generally eating less sweet stuff than we used to, there’s no risk we’ll run out early.

Making Christmas cards for friends and family. Last minute, as usual.

Opening advent calendars.

We have a multitude of calendars. A bit too many, in my opinion, but hey, it’s not me who needs to keep up with them all.

We begin the day by listening to the radio calendar in bed. The alarms go off, Ingrid comes to our bedroom and pokes at Adrian, and they both come into our bed. The story this year (“Marvinter”, roughly “Nightmare Christmas”) is interesting and the voice acting is good, so we all enjoy it. Plus it’s a nice way to wake – I’m barely awake at the beginning, and mostly OK with getting up by the end of the 10 minutes it takes.

The TV calendar (“Jakten på tidskristallen”, “The hunt for the time crystal”) got good reviews but I really disliked it and didn’t even want to watch it to keep the kids company. The story is silly but I could live with that, but I cannot stand the mannered acting that makes several key characters come across as caricatures rather than actual people. Adrian watches it at school; Ingrid has given up on it.

Both the radio and TV calendars have an accompanying cardboard “open the flap” calendar. In addition, Ingrid drew “open the flap” calendars for both myself and Adrian. I got a Christmas-themed one, while Adrian’s had a Minecraft theme. Plus of course there is the calendar I made, with small gifts for the kids every day. Phew!

Malt bread or vörtbröd is part of Swedish Christmas tradition. It is sometimes possible to find decent vörtbröd in supermarkets if you are lucky, but none compare to the ones that Eric bakes. Rich, spicy, moist and yet fluffy.

Christmas dinner was a candlelit affair.