The studentflak tradition involves a lot of spilled and sprayed beer and other beverages these days. At some point the students realized that this is no good for party clothes, or even ordinary clothes, and now there are special coveralls for wearing on the flak. These aren’t traditional student coveralls (which are actual pieces of clothing) – they’re more like plastic protective gear.

White is boring, of course, so another tradition that has emerges is spray painting the coveralls. Ingrid and her friends had a coverall painting party in our back garden.

National day cake by Ingrid.

Gymnasium graduation is a whole thing in Sweden, and more components seem to become necessary traditions with every passing decade.

One very central part is the utspring, the “running out”, where graduating students exit the school building for the final time, en masse, and are met by their families in the school yard. Families have signs with photos of their student, often cute pictures of the student as a baby. I imagine it originally started as a way to find each other in the teeming mass of hundreds of people, and then took on a life of its own.

I kind of remember it being a DIY thing, but maybe I’ve got my nostalgia-tinted glasses on. Nowadays in any case there’s plenty of services that deliver ready-made signs with photo, text, and handle, all assembled. I’m old school, going the DIY route. Today I picked up my photo of Ingrid from the photo printing shop – and half the shop was filled with stacks of graduation signs.

One thing they have that mine won’t (not easily, at least) is a plastic cover. If we get a rainy graduation day, I’m going to have to scramble a last-minute solution. What mine will have, though, is decorations and trimmings!

Ingrid’s class had their studentskiva today. It’s a dinner for the graduating students and their parents, that turns into a normal teenage party after the dinner ends and the parents leave. The seating plan had us sitting next to the families of Ingrid’s boyfriend and another close friend of theirs, so we had good company all evening.

This was nice. I don’t often have reason to dress up, and there’s a definite shortage of dinner parties in my life.

Ingrid looking all grown-up and elegant.

The many-hours hand-crafted pasha mould liner did its job well. Didn’t wrinkle or sag, drained well, and made the relief pattern stand out nicely.

Easter in Uppsala with my mum, as per tradition. She and the kids all like traditions and doing things the way they have always been done; makes me kind of restless to change something but I don’t really mind.

Herring and devilled eggs for lunch.

Pasha for dessert. We each have our own version, and while we all each both (because more pasha is always better) and like the other’s, we do think our own is just slightly better.

Lemon merengue pie after dinner.

And the painting of eggs, of course. Note which generation has been taught to straighten up and stop slouching, and which one hasn’t.

Ingrid, who’s the only one among us to regularly practise her craft, makes intricate little paintings.

Adrian focuses on fun designs. Body parts, and blue caterpillars.

My designs this year were inspired by the Desigual dress my mum was wearing, with black circular designs with eightfold symmetry.

It’s pasha season, but the cloth I used to line the pasha mould with went with Eric. (It was part of a juice strainer.) We can’t have Easter without pasha, so it is time to make a replacement.

Cordon Bleu, the kitchen goods store on Vasagatan, had not one but two kinds of muslin/cheesecloth. There is more of a market for this than I thought. I bought the smaller variety, 100% cotton, and my project for today was to sew a liner for the pasha mould.

It took forever. Literally hours and hours. It’s such a small thing – but that just means it has many small fiddly seams, and an awkward 3D shape. And all the seams needed to be enclosed, because we do not want bits of cotton thread in our food or between our teeth. And I must still be doing something wrong with my sewing machine because several times I did something that mucked up the tension on the bottom thread, and had to untangle it and re-do the seam.

But! Now I have a liner. I will be using it until the day that I die, to make it worth the effort. And then my children and my children’s children will be obliged use it until the end of their lives as well, until the cloth falls apart.

The pasha itself went much faster and easier.

Today was the first day warm enough for the team at Sortera to have lunch outside in the sun on the quay.

Today was also the day I found a last, lost, lonely lussebulle in a corner of the freezer. Still tasted good.

Today was not my mum’s birthday, but we celebrated anyway. The kids are both very used to having birthday parties on some random day, chosen for reasons of practicality rather than calendrical accuracy. My mum is not quite as convinced that this is an acceptable way of doing things, but didn’t object to being offered dinner and cake.

For the cake part of things, Ingrid made and decorated macarons.

Raspberry and dark chocolate macarons, using freeze-dried raspberries both in the macarons and for decorations. Much less messy than fresh or puréed raspberries, very clever.

A few snapshots from the Bergheden family Christmas party. Food (potluck style), conversations, and presents for the kids.