For Adrian, I continue our tradition of daily chocolate toffees from Åre Chokladfabrik – a mixture of their Christmas toffees, saffron toffees, and salted caramel toffees. Except this year I only fill the pockets for every other week.

Ingrid asked for something weekly instead – daily sweets would be too much sugar, and daily anything would be too much to keep up with. So she gets a classical Christmas-themed short story and a Christmas-themed loose-leaf tea every Sunday in advent.

I occasionally vaguely consider giving myself an advent calendar of my own – there are even yarn advent calendars – but always decide against it. I generally don’t want more stuff in my life, and the stuff do I buy, I’m picky about. I buy with purpose. Random yarn, no matter how pretty, would be wasted on me. Chocolates, cheeses, liqueur… yarn, seeds, whatever – same. Something like the short stories that I got for Ingrid would possibly be the only exception.

First advent Sunday.

I hung up advent stars inside, and another light garland on the front porch, and sprinkled miscellaneous Christmas stuff here and there. Now the house feels very Christmas-y. As long as I don’t look outside, where it’s +8°C and rain.

We had glögg and advent fika after dinner. Haven’t had time to bake anything Christmas-themed yet – somehow the hanging up of lights took hours – so we have fika from Spånga Konditori. A saffron bun for Adrian, and cakes with saffron curd and vanilla pannacotta and a lingonberry glaze for Ingrid and myself.

Tomorrow is the first Sunday of Advent and it’s time to get the Christmas mood going. Tomorrow is also going to be rainy, so I’m starting with the outdoor lights today.

The thuja in the garden is perfectly placed for Christmas lighting, nicely visible from the whole living room and at just the right distance. What it is not, is perfectly shaped for hanging Christmas lights. It’s very much directed upwards, not like a spruce or a fir with rounds of nearly-horizontal branches, and its boughs are quite delicate. I’ve figured out something of a technique that doesn’t bend the branches and gives an aesthetically pleasing result. It’s a hassle, involving a stepladder which I need to move several times, and a garden fork as an arm extender to allow me to hook the lights over the branches, and even then it takes me several tries for each loop.

When I had done all the work and was all sweaty and a mixture of pleased and frustrated, and put the plug in, I discovered that only about half the garland was lighting up. The rest was dark. It’s daylight, you can’t see the lights very well in the photo, but there are eight vertical lines and only four of them are lighting up.

I had plugged it in while it was still in the box, specifically to avoid wasting my time hanging up something that was not working. But the top layer in the box looked good, and enough of it lit up to give the impression of everything working, and I thought it would be an all-or-nothing situation, so I didn’t even think to check further in.

Now I had to take everything down again, do research to find a new garland, drive somewhere to pick it up, and go through the whole ladder-fork-cable exercise again. Because the alternatives – having to look at sad, broken Christmas lights, or having to put up the new ones in the rain tomorrow, or not having any lights at all for the first Advent Sunday – were even worse.

Got it done in the end, with much huffing and sighing, so now Christmas can start.

The process would be a lot easier if I had more arms. Or maybe if I had a different tool. The garden fork is big and heavy and requires two hands. If I had something lighter, I could have one in each hand, which would make it much easier to put the garland where I want it to go. With one extended hand, I’m just sort of half-shoving, half-throwing it up and hoping that it will catch on a bough. With two, I could maybe actually shape it into an arch. Hmm.

Ingrid’s birthday was on an away week. We had an extra mini-celebration today, since she’s here now. With Estonian cake! (From the Baltic shop in Sollentuna.)

Did I remember to take photos of the celebration, the presents, or the eating of cake? No, I did not.

Happy early birthday to me! Adrian will be away at scout camp on my actual birthday, so we celebrated today. A summery salad, the traditional redcurrant cake, and board games.

I’m not an expert baker but the cake came out exactly as it should. Even with the additional challenge of trying to bake it in 28-degree heat. The dough went from “so chilled it’s hard to roll out” to “so warm that it melts” before I managed to fully roll it out. I ended up pressing it in place with my fingers, and then putting it in the fridge again to keep it from melting before it could be baked.

The cake rose like a souffle in the oven, above the edges of the cake tin, but sank down within its walls again as it cooled.

Midsummer, with herring, new potatoes, and strawberry cake. No devilled eggs this year, since I’ve had quite enough of them with all the leftovers from Ingrid’s graduation party.

Strawberries are always kind of expensive this early in the summer, but the price this year was truly eye-watering. 90 kronor per litre in our local supermarket; 100 kr in Uppsala where my mum bought hers. That’s about 5 kr a bite. And I used to think that 50 kr a litre was expensive.

According to media, frost nights in May killed a lot of strawberry blossoms, and the cold weather after that delayed the harvest. There just aren’t enough strawberries.

Ingrid shared a Tiktok video joking about strawberry prices. 35 kr in 2015, 70 kr in 2025, and then 700 kr in 2030 with “we can set up a loan for you with automatic wage garnishment for the next three months to pay for these”.

Ingrid’s graduation party.

We were incredibly lucky with the weather. A week ago the forecast was promising 28°C and sunshine, which would have had all of us sweating and gasping for air. Now we just had a beautiful summer day, warm rather than hot, sunny but with a bit of a breeze.

I put the camera to the side for a while. A friendly soul picked it up, so now I have photos of me and Ingrid, too!

The “kids’ table” with Ingrid and some of her best friends.

There was cake – from the bakery where Ingrid works, of course.

Ingrid’s baby cousin was incredibly interested in the cakes, to the point where I felt I had to keep watch to make sure Ingrid could actually be the first one to cut a slice.

We had a quiz with 20 questions about Ingrid, and I presented the correct answers with the cake. Ingrid’s boyfriend won; I guess any other outcome would have been slightly concerning.

Ingrid’s graduation day.

We got to the school yard in good time, we thought, 45 minutes before the actual event, but there was already a big crowd there.

When the graduates came out, the crowd became a sea of signs. We ended up towards the back, so Adrian as the tallest of us got the task of holding up our sign.

Here’s our proud high school graduate!

And here’s us, proud of our high school graduate.

Once more, with feeling:

\

There was some time for friends and family to congratulate and take photos and what not. Then the graduates went back into the school building to change out of their nice dresses and suits and into their coveralls for the studentflak ride.

One last moment of showing off their shiny selves…

… and then the mood switched boom boxes, plastic whistles, and copious sprayed drinks.

The flak trucks for all the graduating classes took off as a convoy towards the city centre, and the rest of us went home. Ingrid came home a few hours later, completely drenched.

We celebrated the end of the school year – today for Adrian, tomorrow for Ingrid – with a dinner at Sushi Sukai. Both of them finish their years with excellent grades.

Sushi Sukai was also excellent, with interesting and delicious food. Everything from crab tacos to spicy fried popcorn shrimp, salmon tartar to tuna tataki.