The tulip bulbs in the flower pot on my front porch think it’s spring. I hope that the green shoots can survive the actual winter weather that will come soon.

Christmas is almost here. Ingrid, Adrian and I decorated the tree today; Nysse watched with great interest.

Then I made mince pies.

In the past I’ve mostly stayed out of this project – Eric was always the master baker, and my mother sometimes came here for a Christmas baking session, so there wasn’t room or need for me to get involved. They always made it seem very tricky: the filling bubbled out of the pie, the edges didn’t stay closed. Either I was lucky, or I somehow absorbed their learnings by osmosis – my first attempt came out great. Not picture perfect – there was a little bit of leakage – but much better than I expected, based on watching them work.

The body of the striped sweater is done. Now I need to do something about all the yarn ends.

I didn’t even cut the yarn for every stripe – only when it was unused for two centimetres or so. Even so, they are SO MANY. I regret that choice; I should have just lived with the long floats.

The website that had a recipe for “the ultimate lussebullar” also had one for “the ultimate Christmas wort bread”. The former was so great that I didn’t even go looking for an alternative recipe, just went straight for this one when I found it.

Baking any kind of bread in this cold house takes a lot longer than what the recipes say. I now turn on the radiator in the kitchen, even when I’m not cold myself, so that I can set the bread dough to rise next to it. Otherwise it takes forever and I’m not even sure that the dough will actually rise fully.

The result was absolutely delicious – just as dark and moist and fluffy and flavourful as a good wort bread should be.

Christmas party! As one of the newly-joined employees this year, I was roped into the party committee. Which really didn’t involve much more than a brainstorming session for finding a theme. After that, our new office assistant took over, because it turned out that organizing a party is one of her favourite activities, and she wasn’t very interested in offloading any tasks to the rest of us. Until this afternoon, when I got to hang up balloons and other decorations.

It didn’t look like much in strong lamplight but felt quite festive with added disco lighting.

And here’s my alien costume! There were a few more aliens in the party crowd, and three Edgar the Bugs.