Years of dedicated practice have led to very impressive results. (This is a birthday present for one of her best friends, who is a big fan of Titanfall.)

Devilled eggs, herring of various kinds, fake vegetarian herring, and assorted side dishes.

Pasha with raspberry coulis.

Painted Easter eggs. My mum and I manage stylized but recognizable objects, and pretty patterns. Adrian does his own thing. Ingrid is the only one who actually practices painting and therefore makes more and more impressive designs each year, with just 8 crappy colours.

She’s off. No longer the one who always gets a lift from others.

Ingrid bought a moped before Christmas, with all her savings and some support from us as an early Christmas gift. It’s been standing in our garage, doing nothing, for months. She already had her license as well, so she’s been anxious to take it out for many weeks but the weather hasn’t allowed it. Now that the streets are finally mostly ice-free, it’s a go.

Today she and Eric replaced the moped’s broken footplate. This project involved detaching literally all fairings and assorted other bits (which she listed for me but I already forgot) to access the footplate, and then putting them back again. It took hours. But now the moped is all ready!

(Ingrid’s closest group of friends are nearly all boys, and all very interested in cars and mopeds. Ingrid knows way more about sports cars than I did at her age.)

We discovered the wonders of singles queues at ski lifts last year. This year we pretty much went all in for the singles queues and effectively cut our queueing time in half, by my estimate. Often we didn’t even end up riding the lift alone – there were many groups of three and four people in the main queue on the six-seater lift, which left two or even three seats free for the single queue. Win-win!

Our second time-saving, ski-experience-enhancing trick is to eat a slightly later lunch. At around twelve o’clock, all the families with young kids flood the restaurants and leave the slopes empty. Sometimes the slopes were so empty at midday that we could glide right into the single queue, double pole our way through it without even slowing down, and swoosh straight into a lift seat. Down and up and down again without a single stop.

Branäs is a smallish resort with a lot of family-friendly blue slopes. It didn’t take long for a few favourites to emerge, mostly based on the availability of chair lifts. Button lifts are cute but take forever to actually get anywhere. And you’re on your own all the way – can’t talk to anyone else. Chair lifts on the other hand turn skiing into much more of a social activity.

The slopes down in Mattesdalen with its four-seater chair lift were quite long and had some really nice stretches, but also a horrible icy patch in the middle where three slopes met. Every time we got there it was really crowded, with people struggling to get past the ice and the churned-up drifts of snow on top.

When we tired of skiing over there, we spent hours simply going up and down a single slope on the other side. The slope itself was mostly in the sun, in good shape, neither icy nor uneven, and the six-seater lift there seemed brand new and got us up the mountain smoothly and comfortably. After a while we knew the individual features of that piste by heart – keep to the left here at the top, stay away from that icy patch next to the lift queue, watch out for skiers coming in from the side over here.


Adrian worked on braking less and getting his turns more parallel. Later in the afternoon he tried out the bumpier ground just off the piste, under the lift. Ingrid challenged herself by dramatic hockey stops, aiming to throw as much snow in the air as possible (or on Adrian’s skis when he’d already stopped before her).

Branäs is situated at a low elevation. Where the peak in, say, Åre or Idre is above the treeline, offering dramatic views of windswept snow and ice, in Branäs you’re never far from civilization. There are trees all the way up to the top of the mountain, and houses everywhere between and around slopes. Very convenient, but I did miss the wide mountainous vistas, and the peace and quiet of skiing through a slope surrounded by nothing but forest.

Eating waffles at the bottom of Mattesdalen in Branäs.

Branäs is a smallish ski resort that we honestly mostly chose because all the other places were fully booked by the time we decided that, yes, we do dare go on a ski trip this year. But it seemed to suit us well: relatively close to Stockholm, with pet-friendly accommodation available, and with plenty of relatively gentle slopes.

(Yes, we brought Nysse with us. He didn’t enjoy the long drive much, but we’re also pretty sure that he wouldn’t have enjoyed being alone for five days either, with some stranger stopping by only to feed and water him and empty the litter box. Now that we’re here, he’s all happy again.)

Mostly Branäs is as expected. Plenty of blue slopes. Small-scale, with lots of button lifts and just two chairlifts.

The restaurants have been truly disappointing, though. They all use app-based ordering, which is practical I guess, but whenever I use these things I feel like I’m doing the staff’s work for them. And our lunches today were just barely on the right side of edible. The pizzas were thick and doughy and barely had any sauce. The “creamy mushroom pasta” I ordered barely had enough sauce to almost coat all of the overcooked pasta, and contained a total of 2 smallish mushrooms (each chopped into quarters). Even school cafeteria lunches are better than that.

We took a waffle break in the afternoon to rest our legs and top up our blood sugar. Here as well the overall impression was cheap and impersonal. Order in the app, get your cardboard plate with a waffle from an overworked staff member, eat it in a room with the blandest possible interior, clean it up yourself.

(Only Ingrid and Adrian are in the picture because Eric took a bad fall and had to cut his snowboarding short for the day.)

We’re in Branäs for a few days of skiing. Arrived in the afternoon, unloaded the car, got our equipment and tried out the slopes closest to us. Branäs has a lot of slopes with artificial lighting which stay open until 19:00, which we like!

The usually-annual post-Christmas party with the extended family, that we could actually have this year. I wasn’t in the mood for photography so there’s just the one, of Ingrid folding napkins.