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.

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

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.

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.

Christmas lights, welcoming us home.

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

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

When we moved back from London to Stockholm, one of the things we brought with us was the tradition of Christmas pudding. And mince pies, which I now see I have never blogged about either.

It tastes a lot better than it looks in a photo.

In England we bought them. Every supermarket in London had Christmas pudding, and if you wanted a fancy one, you got it from Harrods or Fortnum & Mason. Here in Stockholm we also started out with store-bought ones, from NK or The English Shop. But one year (I think maybe because NK stopped carrying them?) Eric tried making his own, and after that there was no going back.

Christmas pudding is served with brandy cream, which you can think of as a sweetened sauce béchamel flavoured with brandy. The pudding on its own is a bit too heavy and sticky, which the sauce helps balance. A hot pudding paired with a cold brandy sauce is the perfect combination.

There is a tiny problem, though: the sauce always runs out before the pudding. So then you buy more sauce – and then you run out of pudding before sauce. And then you buy another pudding. Which works if you’re in London with its abundant offering of Christmas puddings, but is harder when you make your own, which takes a couple of weeks at least if you want it to be really good.

This time when we ran out of sauce I tried hacking the process with a sweetened, brandy-flavoured quark mixture (no cooking, just stir it all together) and it was better than nothing but not as good as a proper sauce.