Following tradition, we’re falling behind on the advent calendar – Ingrid didn’t have time to open hers yesterday. But this year’s activities are less ambitious than some I’ve had before, so it’ll be easy to catch up. Instead of Christmas crafts, there’s “draw a tomte in your style”; instead of making a gingerbread house, there’s “sing Christmas songs throughout the day”. You can even do both on the same day!

Adrian has been trying out drums this term, and today was the end of term show. Just like Ingrid’s dance studio, Kulturskolan has shows for several groups together, so we heard a whole lot of drumming, and brass instruments. Adrian’s beginner group started it off with We Will Rock You. There were some Nirvana songs and Christmas music of course.

Already a few weeks ago Adrian said he wasn’t very interested in continuing, and the concert confirmed that for me. I didn’t see the kind of glow or enthusiasm or energy in him or his playing that inevitably shines when you really enjoy making music. And neither did he seem nervous, which might mask the enthusiasm. He just didn’t seem very interested.

Today’s Christmas activity: writing and posting Christmas cards.

The prices for international postage keep going up and up. The same used to be true for domestic mail, but now there is only one kind of stamp that is no longer printed with a specific price. It just says “Sverige Brev” and the stamps are valid forever, I guess. Or until PostNord decides differently.

PostNord likes selling stamps in packs and not singly. Most years we get one or two left over when we’ve mailed all our Christmas cards. And by the next Christmas, the leftover stamp is useless, because the price has increased. It’s easier to buy a new full-price stamp than to find low-value stamps to make up the price difference, so that leftover stamp remains in the drawer, waiting for a better year.

Now finally the price of domestic mail has nearly caught up with our oldest leftover international stamp, so I used it on the Christmas card going to my mum.

Another thing that keeps surprising me is how rarely PostNord makes any festive international stamps. For Sweden – yes. Christmas trees, snowflakes, reindeer and so on. But for my friends abroad, today I could choose between black and white scenes from Ingmar Bergman movies (seriously!) or a series of motifs with Swedish embroidery. Embroidery it is, then.

I washed a load of medium-coloured laundry today. (We don’t sort ours by colour more specifically, other than separating out black and whites. Modern cotton clothes don’t get colour runs.)

Shortly after the wash program started, the machine started making very loud clanking noises. It sounded like there was a rock in there, or as if some part of the machinery itself had fallen off and was going round and round in the drum.

Nothing to do but wait for the programme to finish, and hope that the clanking thing didn’t wear any holes in any of the clothes.

When we emptied the washing machine afterwards, a literal stone fell out, together with a handful of miniature clothes pins. Apparently one of Adrian’s clothes was in our laundry basket. A bathrobe.

I’ve learned by now to carefully check all the pockets on Adrian’s clothes before washing them, and then checking again in case there was an inside pocket I missed. But I really didn’t expect a bathrobe to need this kind of treatment. Who the heck keeps stones and clothes pins in his bathrobe pockets?

It’s the day of the annual Christmas market in Spånga. It’s mostly filled with school classes and sports clubs selling homemade sweets and cakes, and some stands with crafts. The Spånga scout group is out in force with their traditional chocolate wheel of fortune, and their gingerbread house lottery. Ingrid’s group is manning the chocolate wheel again.

I filled the advent calendar again this year. It’s a mixture of small gifts and tasks. Underwear is a prominent part, since both Ingrid and Adrian have outgrown most of theirs and need new ones.

Yesterday’s “gift” was the opportunity to choose a new desktop background for me. Adrian chose for my home computer and Ingrid for the work one.

What you see here is Ingrid’s chosen wallpaper in all its triple-monitor glory. I can’t deny that it holds a certain appeal, and it’s been a great conversation starter, but looking at its over-the-topness for more than a minute is enough to make my brain hurt. I normally choose the calmest possible wallpapers, like the one here.

Adrian’s choice was an abstract picture of red and blue fire on a black background. There’s more energy in it than in the taco cat, but at the same time it is quieter.

Our lussebulle-making sessions tend to be proper marathons. Eric makes a giant heap of dough, and then we roll a giant amount of buns, and fill the freezer with enough lussebullar to last us most of the Christmas season.

This time we made a smaller batch. The freezer is not so satisfyingly full as it usually is, but on the other hand the baking went much faster. And I think we all eat less sweets and sugar we used to (possibly with the exception of Adrian) so they probably won’t run as fast as they would have, even a year ago.

I tried store-bought lussebullar a week ago, and they barely tasted like anything. These home-made ones were better, but the saffron flavour wasn’t as strong as I remembered it. The colour looks good, but the taste is just kind of a bit weak. Either it’s nostalgia speaking, and the snow was always deeper when I was young, and the saffron buns more saffron-y, and the sun sunnier… or maybe we got lower quality saffron this year.

Escape rooms are all the rage right now. We had that as our team activity for the last tretton37 social get-together, and today we did it again with the team at our customer’s.

The theme today was zombies – we were tasked with finding a Russian scientist’s notes about his nearly-finished cure for a zombifying virus. It was a well-planned adventure, quite difficult we thought, but fun.

There was a hint button, which we used three times during our hour. The hints we got were all such that we could probably have figured them out if we had lots of time, but not within the hour we had. But with the hints (which were only available with a ten-minute wait after each one) we got it done just in time, so the whole thing was very well calibrated.

We had a “secret Santa” gift exchange at work. My secret Santa gave me some nice, dark chocolate, which I now nibble away at, a square or two at a time, after lunch.

I’m super pleased with the secret Santa gift I gave away. On a hunch, I bought a training top for a colleague who’s mentioned on a few occasions that she really should start going to the gym. The cost limit for the secret Santa gifts was just a hundred crowns, which is almost nothing. But a nearby sports shop just happened to have a big sale. I stretched the 100 kr to 130 which was enough for a really nice top at 70 % off. My colleague was more pleased and amazed than I could have hoped.

It’s lussebulle season!