Ingrid and Adrian decorated the Christmas tree today. This year’s tree is a fir again, which goes counter to tradition and instinct but looks better and sheds less.

In the evening, the kids made gingerbread houses with Eric’s help. There are ready-made kits you can buy, but this year they’re making them almost from scratch. (But using store-bought dough, because by the time we eat them they will be dry and dusty and using home-made dough would feel like a bit of a waste.) This way we can make much smaller houses, so it’s conceivable that we might actually eat them.

The supermarket had something called “baking glue” which I haven’t seen before. We’ve tried using melted sugar to assemble the houses, and icing, but neither has worked very well. This baking glue was much easier to use than sugar, and stronger than icing.

Following tradition, we’re falling behind on the advent calendar – Ingrid didn’t have time to open hers yesterday. But this year’s activities are less ambitious than some I’ve had before, so it’ll be easy to catch up. Instead of Christmas crafts, there’s “draw a tomte in your style”; instead of making a gingerbread house, there’s “sing Christmas songs throughout the day”. You can even do both on the same day!

Today’s Christmas activity: writing and posting Christmas cards.

The prices for international postage keep going up and up. The same used to be true for domestic mail, but now there is only one kind of stamp that is no longer printed with a specific price. It just says “Sverige Brev” and the stamps are valid forever, I guess. Or until PostNord decides differently.

PostNord likes selling stamps in packs and not singly. Most years we get one or two left over when we’ve mailed all our Christmas cards. And by the next Christmas, the leftover stamp is useless, because the price has increased. It’s easier to buy a new full-price stamp than to find low-value stamps to make up the price difference, so that leftover stamp remains in the drawer, waiting for a better year.

Now finally the price of domestic mail has nearly caught up with our oldest leftover international stamp, so I used it on the Christmas card going to my mum.

Another thing that keeps surprising me is how rarely PostNord makes any festive international stamps. For Sweden – yes. Christmas trees, snowflakes, reindeer and so on. But for my friends abroad, today I could choose between black and white scenes from Ingmar Bergman movies (seriously!) or a series of motifs with Swedish embroidery. Embroidery it is, then.

It’s the day of the annual Christmas market in Spånga. It’s mostly filled with school classes and sports clubs selling homemade sweets and cakes, and some stands with crafts. The Spånga scout group is out in force with their traditional chocolate wheel of fortune, and their gingerbread house lottery. Ingrid’s group is manning the chocolate wheel again.

Our lussebulle-making sessions tend to be proper marathons. Eric makes a giant heap of dough, and then we roll a giant amount of buns, and fill the freezer with enough lussebullar to last us most of the Christmas season.

This time we made a smaller batch. The freezer is not so satisfyingly full as it usually is, but on the other hand the baking went much faster. And I think we all eat less sweets and sugar we used to (possibly with the exception of Adrian) so they probably won’t run as fast as they would have, even a year ago.

I tried store-bought lussebullar a week ago, and they barely tasted like anything. These home-made ones were better, but the saffron flavour wasn’t as strong as I remembered it. The colour looks good, but the taste is just kind of a bit weak. Either it’s nostalgia speaking, and the snow was always deeper when I was young, and the saffron buns more saffron-y, and the sun sunnier… or maybe we got lower quality saffron this year.

The company Christmas party this year took place at Såstaholm. It’s a place with a story, and the theatre theme ran strong through the entire interior. There were posters, photos, rooms named after recipients of their annual prize to young actors etc.

But better than all that was their collection of theatre costumes. Two large rooms in the basement were full of real, “retired” costumes from the Royal Opera and the Royal Dramatic Theatre. After we’d all eaten the traditional julbord, while some people went to the bar for drinks, others went downstairs to play dress-up. Later there were pirates and bishops and counts in capes in the crowd hanging out at the bar.

I found this amazing, wonderful skirt: black, floor length, wide and swishy, with several different luxurious fabrics, all shimmering and lacy. Underneath and between the visible layers there were hidden swathes of yet more fabric. With all its layers upon layers of cloth, the skirt was far heavier than my thick winter coat!

Looking inside I found one part that was like a thick tail, a rope of fabric tied together with string. It was bunched up at the top but the rest simply hung down, longer than the front of the skirt. I think it was supposed to add some fullness at the back, and structure and heaviness to the “train”. When I walked, the tail trailed behind me, invisibly under the skirt, and just sort of made the visible fabric fall differently. Quite an interesting construction detail, I thought.

I kind of wished I could take the skirt home and have it forever. But then again it was so supremely impractical that I would hardly ever wear it, not even for parties. That thing would be quite impossible to wear outside the house, but also nearly impossible to wear among other people. (Among modern people, that is, who are unused to walking among ladies with trailing skirts. I guess people used to manage, two hundred years ago.) Even as I was trying it on, someone already stepped on the fringe of the train. But still…

There were a few other skirts and dresses and corsets that I wanted to try, but couldn’t fit into. Here’s one from The Nutcracker that seems to have been used in six seasons, from 1984 to 1991. The label says “vita par” so I guess it was used for some “white pair” dance.

I’m not exactly large, but the ballerinas must be truly tiny to fit into those things! I know that they are super slim, so I wasn’t entirely surprised when the skirt waists were way to narrow for me. But even the corset tops were far too small. I don’t understand how they can have rib cages as narrow as that.

Maybe they were teenagers when they wore it, I thought. But I looked up one of the dancers (the things you can do with Google nowadays!) and, no, she was 24.

Nu är glada julen slut, slut, slut,
julegranen kastas ut, ut, ut…

Some years we buy a spruce. This year we had a fir tree. The spruces smell nice but shed needles like crazy. This one shed almost none, and just started looking a bit limp after a long time of no watering. Almost hard to believe that it wasn’t made of plastic. Very practical.

The Estonian post office knows how to design postage stamps that evoke a Christmas feeling. This parcel fit right in with the prettily gift-wrapped ones under the tree.

Our Christmas tree decorations are as eclectic as usual. The kids’ hand-made papercraft decorations mingle with delicate glass balls, cheap second-hand plastic decorations, novelty decorations in the shapes of moose and pigs, jingling heart-shaped mini-wreaths, hand-painted Ukrainian decorations and hand-sewn English ones, and everything else you can possibly think of. I thought we could perhaps throw out some of the oldest home-made things but when I told the kids to hang up only the things they actually really wanted to see on the tree, they hung up all of them, so I guess everything is loved by someone.

Today is the last day at school before Christmas break, and class 2B treated us to Christmas carols.