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

Sweeney Todd at the Royal Opera. Technically a musical, which is nice, because it made the whole thing sound more pop-culture-ish and got the kids to join, but really, what makes this a musical rather than an opera?

I was most impressed by the work of the dialect coach, because Ms Lovett sounded as British as could be, and so did the others.

It’s Christmas Eve!

Knowing Nysse and his habit of attacking wrapped-up gifts, with all their play-friendly paper and ribbons and shiny bits, we didn’t leave the gifts out overnight. But when he’d had his breakfast and gone out, we put the gifts under the tree. He managed to attack one of them – luckily the one where the inner layer was a sturdy cardboard tube, and thus hard to damage and easy to re-wrap – but after that I kept my eye on him all the time and chased him away twice, after which he was almost afraid of even going near the tree, so there was no more damage.

Lunch was devilled eggs, pickled herring of three kinds (flavoured with blackcurrant, apple and curry, and mustard, respectively) and a citrus and gravad lax salad. Plus potatoes and vörtbröd, a Swedish Christmas bread.

Ingrid piped and decorated the eggs, and folded the napkins.

The citrus and salmon salad was a new entry on the menu. Tasted good!

Then it was time for presents. With everybody so grown-up, there’s a lot less cheering and jumping up and down than there used to be!

Nysse, when he woke up, attacked the rolled-up Santa hats as if they were fluffy little animals, and for some reason really enjoyed licking the little olive wood bowl that I gave to Eric.

A Christmas day with my brother.

I picked him up by car in Uppsala as usual. What was not as usual was the thick slush coming down from the sky. I also hadn’t accounted for today being the first day of Christmas break and thus large crowds heading out of town to their cabins in the woods or wherever. The roads were slippery and full of snow and a lot more traffic than usual for 7:30 on a Saturday morning. The drive there and back usually takes me an hour and a half, but took two and a half today. For a good chunk of the way, we were all driving at 40 km/h behind a pair of snow ploughs.

Anyway, I managed to not become a statistic (and we saw no cars on the side of the road and no cars with sirens on) so all is good.

Then we baked. More lussebullar in all sorts of shapes, because after a while we all become bored with the traditional ones. There were lusse croissants and doodles and swirls and twists, and even a lusse snow lantern.

And then we made a batch of mince pies, too, because those are delicious and everyone should have access to mince pies at Christmas.

Eric and the kids will mostly have brand new furniture for their new apartment.

A lot of what we have here has been bought specifically for these rooms. They’re the right size and shape and colour for their places. It wouldn’t make sense to move this sofa elsewhere and buy a replacement for it here, or the kitchen table, etc.

Bookshelves are an exception. The IKEA Billy is the quintessential bookshelf in Sweden, and unless you’re splurging on something custom-built, it rarely makes sense to get anything else. It’s just a matter of choosing between oak veneer or white.

Since we’re divvying up the books, we’re doing the same with the bookshelves. I helped Eric move half of ours to the new apartment today, along with the first batch of boxes.

We made gingerbread cookies. Store-bought ones can’t compete, and I realize I need to copy Eric’s recipe because otherwise next Christmas in this household will be a sad affair.

Every year we tell ourselves that we will only bring out the most important cutters and that there is no need to dirty all of them. Our priorities overlap but only partially, and we end up using at least two thirds of all the cutters anyway. I like the traditional shapes, Ingrid wants the ones that are good for decorating, Adrian prefers the small ones that are best at using up the most dough. Eric is happy to just bake whatever we cut.

The dough gets smaller and smaller with each round, but there will be no wastage!

Eric got the keys for his new apartment today. I actually didn’t take any photos today, so I’m “borrowing” these from tomorrow, when we went to take a first look at it.

It’s got three bedrooms, two balconies, and a large living room with a very high ceiling and tall windows.

Eric and Adrian are planning out who gets what room, how to furnish the living room, and what will go where in the kitchen.

The party preparations started several days ago, with three cakes baked over three days. We had an apple-pie cheesecake (Ingrid), a banana and chocolate cake (Adrian) and an almond cherry pie (Eric).

Today Ingrid decorated the house with golden balloons and serpentines.

Then there were guests – grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins – and presents.

The cakes and cheeses and snacks were eaten with much joy and appreciation.

There had been some concern that three cakes might be excessive, but it really wasn’t.

With no one to take pictures of me, here are two quick selfies to prove that I was also there.

Afterwards, we were tired.

Eric and Adrian and I went to the movies to see Deadpool & Wolverine. We watched the first two Deadpool movies at home, and thought that the third one deserved to be seen on a big screen.

When the movie came up in conversations at work (people talking about their weekend plans) two separate groups expressed their surprise that I’d watch Deadpool. And I can see their point – I don’t watch comedies much. Many comedies get their laughs out of putting some character in embarrassing situations, and I can’t find anything enjoyable about second-hand embarrassment. At all. But the humour in Deadpool is the opposite – he’s so unashamed, so proud of his crudeness and ass-slapping, that it’s liberating.

That being said, I didn’t enjoy this one as much as the last two. The first one had the best writing; the second one leaned into its ridiculousness; this one just felt repetitive and nonsensical. Barely any of the characters’ decisions made sense, apart from Deadpool himself. The studio decided to “waste” less money on writers, I guess, and spent the budget on actor salaries and special effects instead. I rather enjoyed the running gag in Deadpool 2 about the studio not being able to afford all the X-men.

Movie theatre popcorn, by the way, is ridiculously expensive. 75 SEK for that bucket of what is mostly air!

There’s a lake, and it has boats, so we went for a boat tour. Like in Venice, we opted for an ordinary scheduled passenger boat going from town to town, rather than a sightseeing tour.

The boat took us to the small town of Limone, a little ways down the coast of Lake Garda. As the boat approached town, we were curious about the odd large stone structure that dominated the view. From the Internet I learned that these are old terraced lemon orchards. There are more of those, further up the hills. Some have been restored and turned into tourist sights.

The one closest to the harbour was all hidden behind walls and not open for visitors. There were a couple of small openings in the wall that allowed us to peek in, though.

We weren’t particularly interested in Limone itself – it was just an excursion – so after a brief walk and an ice cream, we took the next boat back to Riva del Garda.

The lake was full of people on all kinds of small craft, mostly windsurfers and small Optimist dinghies. In places the lake looked like a boat soup. I’m guessing there was some kind of sailing camp or course going on, or more likely several of these.

We also saw a kind of board that was new to us – a wing foil. Like a windsurfing board, but instead of a vertical sail attached to the board, these had a large free hand-held wing, and a hydrofoil under the board. They zoomed past like rockets.

By the way, I’ve generally been quite happy with the photos my phone camera takes, while my big camera is out of action, as long as I stay away from the zoom. I guess it switches to a different lens when I zoom, and then the picture quality becomes horrible, like you see in these last three photos. I tried taking a few pictures of flowers while we were hiking in the mountains, but had to throw out every single one of them.

We’ll have nice views for our drive back to Milan tomorrow – that’s our road snaking along the side of the lake.

Back in Riva del Garda, we walked around. The city centre isn’t very large so we could cover almost all of it.

When we didn’t know which way to go, we aimed for leather goods shops. I bought my favourite handbag here in Riva del Garda many years ago (and replaced it with an identical one) so I was hoping I could find something similar again. Small backpack handbags are hard to find. We saw all kinds of lovely bags, but not the type I wanted.

There was apparently a road biking competition that finished here today. We’ve been seeing loads of cyclists, especially around Cortina d’Ampezzo, and posters for bicycle events.

During our boat trip, we spotted a cable car going up to some kind of edifice halfway up the hill. When we ran out of promenade streets, we went to check that thing out. It turned out to be a ruined old bastion, with nice views back down towards the town.

When it was time for dinner, everyone was in agreement – there was no way we’d find anything that would beat Officina Verde, where we ate yesterday. So we went back for more. Since everyone had sampled everything, we knew exactly what we liked best, so instead of the set menus we picked our favourites.

“Something something with hints of the sea:”

Burrata of fermented cashew nut, with a heart of basil and home-made tomato relish:

Lasagna, mille strati style:

Mango mousse sticks with a yuzu chocolate coating and mango sauce: