Today we brought home the Christmas tree and dressed it. Adrian took our talk of “dressing the tree” literally.

The Bergheden family Christmas party took place yesterday. Here’s Ingrid and Adrian playing with the youngest Bergheden cousin, Einar.

We continued making Christmas. Today: gingerbread cookies. We have our own recipe for gingerbread cookie dough, which Eric has tweaked and optimized over the years, so the cookies we make are by now excellently suited to our taste. They are much spicier than store-bought ones.

For a kid, just making cookies is fun enough. Now that has become rather routine, so I come up with extra tweaks to make it more interesting. For example, I like to challenge myself to waste as little dough as possible. Not that it is really wasted, because we roll it out again and again, but do that enough times and the dough becomes too dry and floury.

(Of course an easy way to get the least scraps would be to tile the entire dough with either triangles or crescent moons, but that would be no fun at all, not to bake and not to eat.)

I work inwards from the edges of the rolled dough, choosing the shape that fits best and leaves the least scraps, and then filling in any gaps with smaller shapes.

It was therefore a pleasant surprise when the curve of the Christmas tree turned out to be a perfect fit for the curve of the pig’s belly.

A simple Christmas wreath for the front door.

The local shops have put up their Christmas-themed window decorations and trees in Spånga torg have acquired lights.

The very last and final birthday party for this season: Ingrid’s and Adrian’s combined celebration with the extended families (grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins). Almost like Christmas, in fact, with lots of people and lots of gifts, and slightly too much cake – but with Halloween-themed decorations instead of a tree.

We crafted invitation cards for Ingrid’s upcoming Halloween-themed birthday party. Ingrid drew monsters and skeletons and gravestones on hers. My designs were more abstract.

Adrian’s birthday party. I had bought balloons for decoration. Adrian loved them so we blew up a lot more than planned, in all sorts of shapes, sizes and colours. The kids played with them, and finally popped them all with the bamboo skewers we had used for lunch.

While I was shopping for Christmas gifts for the family, I bought one for myself too: a macro lens. Today I took a few moments to try it out. Holy cow this lens is SHARP.

Speaking of shopping: there’s nothing like a deadline to focus the mind. Five hours of shopping and I was all done. Not the most enjoyable shopping experience (though those are rare in any case) but a very efficient one.

Within a month we have both Adrian’s and Ingrid’s birthday to celebrate, and Adrian’s friend Hanna has her birthday two days before Adrian.

So we have within the space of about 5 weeks:

• Hanna’s birthday party
• Adrian’s actual birthday
• Adrian’s birthday party
• A gathering for the extended family for both kids
• Ingrid’s actual birthday
• Ingrid’s birthday party

We celebrated Adrian’s birthday early in the morning before school with a little cake and candles and singing the birthday song.

We hadn’t actually intended to have much of a party for him, thinking him too young, but Adrian had very definite wishes about which friends he wanted to invite, so we had a party anyway. Adrian asked for a strawberry cake, so we had both that and some cookies, and chocolate sprinkles on top.

Ingrid’s head has been full of birthday thoughts since early September. She makes lists, and plans, and draws and writes invitations. She considers types of cakes (Swiss roll? or waffles with ice cream?) and whom to invite and what games to play.