We finally brought home a Christmas tree. We’ve never been this late and this lax with the Christmas preparations. For the first time in years I didn’t even remember to send any Christmas cards. Sorry, folks. At leat we’ve bought gifts for the kids.

My brother came by for a pre-Christmas visit. We made gingerbread cookies. We all take optimal dough usage very seriously. It matters! Every time you gather up the scraps and roll out the dough again, you work more flour in it. This year the dough was perfect to begin with, easy to work with. By the fourth or fifth rolling, it was all dry and barely workable.

Later we also made mince pies which I love even more than gingerbread cookies. Both taste great, especially when made from scratch after years of tweaking the recipes, but mince pies are moister.

Today was a very Christmas-themed day.

From shortly after lunch I was helping prepare for the Urb-it Christmas-ish dinner – fetching and carrying and shopping and setting the table etc. In the afternoon I walked over to tretton37 for a Lucia gathering with singing and glögg and lussebullar etc. Then back to Urb-it for the dinner itself.

I’m still amazed by the luck that put the two companies within a hundred metres of each other. I’m glad I didn’t have to choose between the two parties – and it was incredibly convenient I could use the tretton37 office for storing the party materials, because we only had access to the Urb-it office from midday. I had so much stuff – tableware and decorations and snacks and what not.

Urb-it today feels somewhat like the tretton37 Stockholm office felt like when I joined in 2017: small-scale and DIY. We ordered our own food. Someone brought a speaker from home for the party music, while someone else brought table runners, and a hotplate for the glögg, and so on. tretton37 has grown and become more professional: we have people who fix these kinds of things so the rest of us don’t have to. But the home-made spirit is still there – the singers were a self-organized group from among ourselves. I hope we manage to keep it.

I knit socks during meetings where I’m mostly a passive participant, to help me remain focused and not just zone out or get distracted by reddit or something. At one point I told my teammates, in case they were wondering about my unusual movements.

One of them jokingly said something about knitting a pair for him next. Size 46. Well, joke’s on him, because he’ll be getting a pair of woollen socks for Christmas, in a nice self-striping yarn with a goodly proportion of dark Urb-it green in it.

Size 46 is huge. It’s going to be hard to get the sizing right because I have no feet of that size available to try the socks on. Eric has size 42 and that’s what a pair of normal adult male feet look like in my mind. The step from his feet to size 46 is as large as the step from Adrian’s 11-year-old feet to Eric’s.

Of course I’m doing this rather last minute as usual. But I’ve got the entire weekend ahead of me still.

tretton37 Christmas party at Riddarsalen (Münchenbryggeriet). Good food, good company.

After dinner a group of us played a game where we randomly guessed things about the person sitting next to us, based on nothing but gut feeling and prejudice. I guessed, among other things, that Ben to my right would be an overly cautious driver (and was spot on) and that Farnam to my left collects something weird (and was completely off since he turned out to be strongly against collecting anything). It was a lot of fun.

The people around me guessed that I am particular about some/many things in my life, but not about travel destinations, that I would be happy to travel just about anywhere. Yes, I said, but isn’t everyone like that? Apparently not – people can be very picky about wanting to travel to their bucket list places but definitely not want to go to some-other-place. I really would be happy to travel just about anywhere as long as I don’t have to worry about my health and life – Colombia would definitely be on my no-go list, for example.

It also came out that I am a private person, and that I give a serious impression regardless of what lies underneath. And I do. I keep the private and professional spheres quite separated, and make sure to make a professional impression at work. I don’t even really know why. I’ve done it as long as I can remember, and it is second nature by now. I think I expect people to not take me seriously unless I make them. And I think I expect/fear negative reactions if I let my private self come to the fore, so I keep it safely hidden.

The Christmas tree is looking dull and droopy, and its needles are curling up. Time to throw it out.

It’s funny how much Christmas cheer it can bring when we put it up, and after two weeks it feels just like another piece of furniture.

We had Christmas gifts, somewhat too much Christmas food, and a new batch of gingerbread cookies.

I enjoy the run-up to Christmas more than Christmas Eve itself. Advent has all the good stuff – the lights, the decorations, the baking and then the eating of the baking – without the nearly hectic, keyed-up quality of Christmas itself. Christmas is tiring. Adrian is over-hyped about presents. My mum needs entertaining all day long, so I must keep up an even stream of activities and conversation, but only talk about topics that I don’t really care about because the odds are that I’ll get a snippy negative reply back.

(Ingrid took this photo.)

The first gifts have materialized under the tree, and Adrian can barely contain his excitement. Or rather, he cannot. He can not shut up about the gifts, to the point that I am getting very fed up with it.

Two of the gifts have his name on them, and he is guessing at what might be in there. He set a rule for himself that he today can only look at the gifts, not pick them up to weigh them or shake them. That’s only allowed on Christmas Eve.

But he allowed himself to hold up other things to the wrapped packages to compare their sizes. Look, one is suspiciously similar in size to a Nintendo Switch game sleeve (and Pokemon Sword is at the top of his list), while another matches a series of comic books where we have books 1 and 2, and book 3 has recently been published.

We have a tree. The house immediately feels more festive.

I read an article in a magazine recently about the history of advent stars, starting with the Moravian stars in Germany in the late 19th century and spreading into Sweden, among other places. The article quoted an ethnologist who commented on the current habit of hanging several such stars in one’s home and described it as a sign of wastefulness, wanting much of everything, and as an American ideal leaking in. As opposed to proper Swedish, Lutheran culture where thou shalt not have any fun, I guess.

Vårt välstånd gör oss mer slösaktiga, kanske vi kan säga. Just nu vill vi ha stjärnor och ljusstakar både inomhus, i trädgården och på balkongen. Det amerikanska idealet sipprar in. Vi befinner oss fortfarande i slöseriet och vill ha mycket av allt. Frågan är hur och om det kommer att förändras.

Perhaps the ethnologist lives in a lit-up inner city. Out here in the suburbs the evenings are dark. Heck, even the afternoons are dark, and sometimes there is not much light even in the middle of the day. (Stockholm has seen zero hours of sunlight thus far in December, which is not normal and not fun. This video (in Swedish) by SMHI will tell you more.) And we hang up advent stars and string lights and other kinds of Christmas lights to battle the darkness and bring some light into our lives. So that ethnologist can take her snobbish views and go get stuffed.