November has been dark and dreary, but I held out. Sometimes I hew to tradition. No Christmas lights or decorations, no gingerbread, no lussebullar before advent. Now, though, advent is here and we can finally put up advent lights everywhere, indoors and outdoors.

These coloured, patterned ones are my favourites.

The cloud of spangles in the background is a string of outdoor lights that we hang on our thuja tree. The first time we did it, Eric could reach nearly all the way to the top and the lights covered most of the tree. Now more than ten years later the tree is twice as tall and the lights are like a little apron on the tree.

We may not get a proper Christmas celebration this year but we can at least enjoy making lussebullar.

Adrian had a small birthday party.

He’s been pondering for awhile now whether to have a party or not, and if yes, what kind? Now he decided to have a sleepover and Minecraft party with a few of his classmates.

He really is very undemanding when it comes to parties these days. All he asked for from us was pancakes for dinner. The rest he took care of himself, including messaging his friends to agree on times and get RSVPs.

They spent all afternoon playing Minecraft together. After the pancake dinner they went up to his room where they did I don’t know what.

For some reason they barely slept all night. A couple of his friends “couldn’t sleep” and also couldn’t shut up and let the others sleep. Still, they were surprisingly perky in the morning. After breakfast and some more gaming, they baked a mud cake together – Adrian’s favourite kind of cake.

In the evening he fell asleep on the sofa shortly after dinner. After I prodded him to move to his own bed, he slept like a log for nearly twelve hours.

Birthday boy opening his birthday presents, early in the morning, before school.

A much needed “new” phone to replace his old one which is not working so well any more. A Lego Ninjago set, a Sorgenfresser plushie, and socks with food patterns.

No, he did not get a bottle Glenlivet. We have a family tradition of reusing good-quality boxes for wrapping completely unrelated presents, especially hard-to-wrap ones. The Glenlivet box held the phone; the Sorgenfresser came in a box made for an iPad Air.

You have to be a little bit careful with this so you don’t send out misleading signals that lead to disappointment and tears instead of joy. A plushie in an iPad box only works if you’re quite sure that the giftee does not actually expect that box to hold an iPad.

Happy birthday to me! It turns out I’m now forty-three years old. I have learned by now that I’m forty-something. I still can’t keep track of the exact number of years, though, and have to do some mental arithmetics whenever someone asks. Funny thing, that. Eric could probably recall my age better than I do. Even Adrian can, I think, but he on the other hand cannot remember my date of birth. For him the age is more interesting than the date.

Forty-three is a great age. I’ve had about twenty-five years of adult life and I expect at least as many more, before I might start thinking of myself as “getting old”.

Eric made the lovely cake. It’s raspberry mousse and lemon frosting on a brownie base. Just the kind of cake I love best: light and moist and with a fresh, tangy, fruity flavour.

Looking through yesterday’s photos, I realized that I was barely present in them, and then only as a small white figure in the distance.

Today I put on my Midsummer dress and my summer hat and took some self-portraits under the cherry tree.

Official Midsummer celebrations with maypoles and music such are not happening this year due to covid-19. We usually have a Midsummer picnic somewhere. And we don’t need an official celebration for that!

Most Swedes celebrate on Midsummer’s Eve. I didn’t have time to plan or prepare anything for yesterday, so we had our picnic today instead, at Hammarskog. Normally there would be a folk band and a maypole and dancing around it, but Hammarskog is a nice picnic spot without all that as well. There’s a wide open lawn sloping towards a view of a lake, and trees all around.


We had a nice and leisurely picnic lunch with silltårta and devilled eggs, and a strawberry and elderflower cake.

The cake was almost the same one as last year, because it was so delicious. (Here’s the recipe, possibly behind a paywall.) This year we transformed it into a Swiss roll, though, because Swiss rolls are more fun than cake-shaped cakes, and easier to transport. The marinated strawberry filling went inside the roll, and we spooned the elderflower curd on top of each slice, and then piled strawberries on top.

After lunch hung around for a while and didn’t quite feel like going home yet. Then we decided to play games. Apparently that’s a tradition at Midsummer parties, which I wasn’t aware of. Now I know. Femkamp, meaning a contest in five different “events”, is the most traditional form. We had no plans and no equipment with us, so we improvised with what we had and tried to find events that can be done more or less equally by all ages, even when wearing a somewhat impractical dress.

• Frisbee throwing with a lunch box lid
• Kast med liten sko, i.e. shoe throwing
• Pin the tail on the donkey (with a few post-its to mark the donkey on the lawn)
• Strawberry-and-spoon race
• Counting to two minutes (with your eyes closed)

Ingrid won every single one of them. But we all had fun, even though the thistles in the lawn bothered Adrian’s bare toes. Even my mum, who can be a bit stiff and “proper” sometimes, went all in!

The lunch box lid made a surprisingly good frisbee. It flew quite well, and even curved the same way a normal frisbee does.

Many of our neighbours apparently partied in their houses instead: there were a lot of noisy parties going on yesterday. People were getting drunk at 6 pm already, and continuing well into the night, some getting rather rowdy.

It’s taken us a while to eat all the Easter eggs. Hard-boiling is not the most delicious way of serving eggs. But some of them accompanied a cauliflower soup, and some we actually had for breakfast.

After knocking them first, of course. The tournament was won by Stitch, who’s just about to meet the referee here. (Stitch beat him, too.)

Pasha looks like a bland, white lump, but tastes delicious. (Not unlike other desserts and puddings, to be fair. How appetizing does panna cotta look, really?) It’s my favourite part of Easter.

Lemon meringue pie, which we also made for Easter, can be so lemony and intensely sweet that after a small slice my body shouts “enough”. But pasha is so refreshing and un-sweet that it almost doesn’t feel like dessert.

Estonian quark is grainier than the Swedish Kesella and fatter than Keso. This year’s tweak to the recipe was to get the best of both by combining them: Kesella for the creaminess, and Keso (passed through a sieve) for texture. This worked out great; I’ll be doing that again next year.

Raisins have always been a part of my pasha, but next year I think I might skip them. They are the least interesting part, adding nothing but sweetness. Maybe dried cranberries could work?

Pasha was always served on its own when I was a child. Nowadays we eat it with raspberry coulis.

Traditions tend to accumulate. Every item is important for someone. Our Easter food traditions are nearly as many as for Christmas.

Easter eggs are a must, both the painted, boiled kind that originally come from hens and the painted, cardboard kind that hide candy inside. And devilled eggs as well.

One year my mum made paella for us at Easter; the kids loved it and now they ask for it every year.

For dessert, pasha is an important tradition for me, and Ingrid and Eric both love lemon meringue pie.

Speaking of eggs, we talked about egg knocking, and soon Adrian and Ingrid had planned an entire tournament for our eggs. Our six eggs were unsatisfyingly few, so we painted some more. They painted one each to bring the total up to eight, and I painted a referee. The referee got a beard, so I now have a skägg-ägg to go with my vägg-ägg and hägg-ägg.

I thought my puzzle was so obvious but it took a lot of hints for the rest of the family to solve it.