Svensk Hemslöjd, “Swedish crafts”, on Norrlandsgatan. It’s an odd shop, selling a mixture of Swedish crafts to mostly tourists, and crafts materials to mostly non-tourists. Right now there’s an explosion of Christmas trinkets filling half the shop, but this place is always a reliable source for nice kitchen textiles like towels and potholders.

Getting out the Christmas cards in time this year. I buy them in good time, and I know I want to send them, and then December arrives and I get caught up in other things. This year, though: calendar reminders, and Ingrid’s help.

We had the tretton37 Christmas party tonight, at Moderna Museet. Very modern food, too: the meat-eaters got everything from deer heart to chicken liver mousse. The herring and the vegetarian mains were delicious, and I hear that those who got past the shock of the menu all enjoyed the food as well.

Party photos are not my thing, and posting photos of other people here without their consent is even less my thing, so here’s a view of the Christmas tree in Gamla Stan across the water.

Christmas lights, welcoming us home.

They also make the first step out of the house in the morning quite a bit nicer.

As a birthday present to myself, I gave myself a dinner at Minako sushi, one of the absolute best sushi restaurants in Stockholm.

We’d reserved a table for an evening two weeks after my birthday, but that very day Nysse came home with broken bones, so the dinner never happened. Then there was Nysse’s convalescence, and then me trying to recover my energy after 6 weeks of near isolation, and then the kids’ birthdays, and suddenly it was November.

Now, though, we made a new reservation and there were no emergencies of any kind, so we had wonderful sushi. Eric, Ingrid and I had sushi at Minako, while Adrian, who isn’t as fond of sushi, ordered dumplings and spring rolls from a local place in Spånga and got the house for himself for the whole evening.

The omakase (chef’s choice) dinner consisted of 7 courses, if I remember correctly. Already the first one, with marinated octopus and seaweed, was incredible. I almost never order octopus because it always feels like rubber, but this one was only delicately chewy.

There were a few plates of nigiri, common in shape but uncommon in the choice of fish. Salmon, yes, but also rainbow trout and arctic char. And cod, which – like octopus – I never like in any cooked form, but was perfect here. Every time I eat really excellent sushi one of my main conclusions is that this is how fish should be eaten. Cooking mostly just destroys it. (Except for very lightly cooked salmon that is just barely not raw.)

My favourite pieces were these futomaki rolls. There was daikon radish in there, and something to do with pumpkin, and tuna, and a leaf that tasted like a cross between mint and coriander, and some other thing that I can’t remember. It all came together into a taste explosion where everything balanced and complemented everything else, and every bite brought out something new.

Our baby cousin’s second birthday, and he got a magnetic construction toy that entertained guests of all ages.

Adrian was most proud of this pentagonal prism with inverted pyramid bottoms.

Ingrid’s actual birthday was a week ago, but that day was a party for the extended family and her and Adrian – rather than for her alone. To give her a celebration that was only for her, we had a family-only second birthday party for her today. With lemon merengue pie, of course!

It came out very lemony this time. Lemon is good, more lemon is better, but apparently there is a point where there is too much lemon in the pie.

Adrian and Eric made a birthday cake for Adrian’s birthday yesterday, using the same recipe as two years ago. It’s delicious, again, but also huge, again. If it gets made again, we’ll use no more than half the amount of frosting in the recipe.

PS: When we had eaten half the cake, I weighed the rest out of curiosity – and it was 1.5 kg, making the whole cake a whopping 3 kg. That’s a heck of a lot of cake.

Adrian’s one an only birthday present this year – which is also his Christmas gift – is a new gaming computer. Just like for Ingrid’s computer three years ago, Eric did all the choosing and ordering, and almost all the building and assembling. It went smoother than the building of Ingrid’s computer – by the end of the day, Adrian had a shiny, colourful new computer.

Following time-honoured tradition and wrapping birthday presents late at night. These required a lot of paper and tape.