13|37 Christmas party at Lux on Lilla Essingen. Great food, nice venue, and I was lucky with the company at my table, so it was a great night.

The advent calendar is up, filled with Lego.

There was a lull a few years ago when Adrian wasn’t that interested in Lego, but now he’s building regularly again. His entire wish list for Christmas was filled with Lego. So naturally that is also the theme for his advent calendar.

I bought an actual Lego advent calendar once, but it was pretty boring. Each day had pieces for a tiny little build, or a minifigure, which Adrian found underwhelming. I guess it was aimed more at playing than building – which is the opposite of what he’s interested in.

This year I bought a normal Lego Creator set and made a DIY advent calendar out of it. Printed out a copy of the instructions, divided them into 24 more or less equal parts, sorted out the pieces for each day (which took Eric and me a good chunk of an evening) and wrapped them in the printed pages. Now he gets to build a part of the set every day, and on the last day I’ll bring out all the instruction booklets so he kind of gets a gift for free. The Creator sets are nifty that way: they use the same bunch of pieces to build three completely different things with the same theme.

Ingrid asked for an advent calendar from Pen Store. Sketchbooks, pens and pencils, modelling clay and other art materials. We haven’t tried this before; we’ll see whether it’s a way to discover new fun stuff or just a way for the store to offload things they wanted to get rid of.

If we had no children in the house, I’m not sure we’d bother with a Christmas tree. But I’d definitely still want Advent lights.

Every year since 1988, the Swedish Retail Institute has announced a “Christmas gift of the year” – a product that somehow embodies the zeitgeist for that year. Apparently it is based on “an independent analysis of consumption trends” but it’s probably just some group’s fingers in the air.

Sometimes they capture the beginning of a trend, or the introduction of a product that stays. The CD player in 1992, a cookbook in 2002 when cookbooks were starting to be hip, a flat-screen TV in 2004. Sometimes they zoom in on a temporary madness – the spiky acupressure mat in 2009, a juicer in 2013, VR goggles in 2016.

In 2020, the camping stove got to embody the Swedish people’s new-found love for the outdoors, triggered by the covid quarantine; in 2021 an event ticket symbolized the end of the quarantine.

Anyway, it’s a bit of fun, even though I’ve never let it affect my actual choices of Christmas gifts.

Until this year. The Christmas gift of the year for 2022 is a home-knitted garment. Inflation is high, and so are electricity costs. There is a war going on, and people in bombed-out cities are without heating or electricity. The world feels like a chilly place. People want something to warm them, both in body and heart. And home-made crafts, which used to be something for grannies and oddball hippie activists, are suddenly trendy again.

I have a cardigan to finish, and I really hadn’t planned to knit any more socks right now, but I couldn’t pass up this opportunity. So there will be some socks under the tree this year again. I did half a sock today, just in meetings or while reading – thicker yarn makes the work go fast – so I can easily get some done before Christmas.

Stockholm is putting up generous amounts of Christmas lights in the city as well, not just in Spånga.

The Christmas lights at Spånga Torg are up. We’ve gotten new lights this year – there used to be spirals of lights around a few of the trees, but they were purple, and only wound around the largest branches. Now it’s like they’ve wound the strings around every single twig. Looks very impressive, and brightens things up very nicely. It must have been a tricky job.

I found one last, forgotten gingerbread cookie in a jar in the kitchen. Christmas is not over yet!

The usually-annual post-Christmas party with the extended family, that we could actually have this year. I wasn’t in the mood for photography so there’s just the one, of Ingrid folding napkins.

I want to thank everybody who sent us Christmas cards this year, even though I forgot.

One card stood out because of the envelope it arrived in – a Soviet-era envelope from 1987, with a New Year’s Eve celebratory design. Complete with boxes for filling in the postal code in a standard way, down at the bottom left. (The flap of the envelope has examples of all ten digits, so that the boxes get filled in correctly.) The boxes for postal code have existed for as long as I can remember, and clearly at least since 1987, so I guess they had OCR for sorting mail already back then?

There was officially no Christmas in Soviet Estonia, since Christmas and everything else with Christian roots was a despicable remnant of bourgeois mores and thus Not Done. We nevertheless celebrated Christmas in our home, on the quiet, and so did many other households.

Official midwinter celebrations were all for the New Year. Apart from the name and the date, it was very similar to Christmas, though… with decorated trees with baubles and lights, gingerbread cookies, and a bearded man bringing gifts. The bearded man was Ded Moroz, Father Frost, who was usually clothed in blue rather than red, and whose sled was pulled by three horses rather than a bunch of reindeer, but who otherwise functioned very much like Santa Claus. (TIL that even Ded Moroz was too bourgeois and was banned after the Bolshevik revolution in 1917, but brought back a few decades later.)

In Estonian, Ded Moroz was not called Father Frost or külmataat, but näärivana, because he fused with not only Christmas but also the old Estonian New Year’s traditions, called näärid. Fun fact for you: näärid have their roots in Scandinavian traditions, and the word itself comes from the Swedish nyår, “new year”.