Eric and Adrian made my favourite birthday cake for me, with tons of redcurrants and a merengue topping.

Our off-and-on-traditional midsummer outing with the Lennakatten museum railway to Marielund.

The weather was hot and the inside of the train like an oven, despite the open windows. The carriage filled up later, but wasn’t as crowded as it’s sometimes been in the past. I think they may have added more carriages to the train.

The train ride took longer than scheduled for some reason, so by the time we arrived and had unpacked the picnic, we attacked the food like a horde of locusts. I barely managed to get a photo of the cake.

Every year we eat pasha for Easter (and a few days after) and mildly grumble that we don’t get to eat it during the rest of the year. My recipe isn’t super sweet, so it almost feels like a snack more than a dessert, and I could eat it if not every day then at least every week.

Devilled eggs, herring of various kinds, fake vegetarian herring, and assorted side dishes.

Pasha with raspberry coulis.

Painted Easter eggs. My mum and I manage stylized but recognizable objects, and pretty patterns. Adrian does his own thing. Ingrid is the only one who actually practices painting and therefore makes more and more impressive designs each year, with just 8 crappy colours.

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 actually had a wish list for Christmas this year, with a single thing on it: I wished for Ingrid to paint a picture for me.

We have two large emptyish walls, and I’ve never found any picture that I’ve felt strongly enough about to want to put there. I was thinking of ordering a Chinese reproduction of some famous painting, and even had an actual shortlist. Then I realized that I have an artist right here in the house, who could make an original work for me, which would be so much more special. Ingrid kindly obliged. I couldn’t be happier with the result.

The wall had been empty for years. Now that there is one painting there, it’s kind of asking for more, isn’t it? Perhaps I can wish for another painting for my birthday.

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”.