Christmas baking day with my brother.

The kids were here but had other things to do. I think they have kind of outgrown much of Christmas. Some bits are important still, but others matter much less than they used to.

It feels like my brother did all the hard work – the kneading and the rolling – while I just brought out ingredients and tools, put things in and out of the oven, and tidied away the dishes and utensils. He did volunteer for all of it, and he did go home with a nice stack of lussebullar as well as gingerbread cookies, so I don’t feel like I took advantage of him too much.

The lussebullar we made based on an online recipe described as “the ultimate”, with 294 votes (averaging at 4.5 stars) and 174 gushingly positive comments. There were no special ingredients involved – just preparation, and attention to detail. It starts with a pre-ferment the night before, has you soak both the saffron and the raisins (separately) etc.

In our not-very-warm house the dough needed a lot more time to rise than the recipe suggested, more like three hours instead of one. Once they were in the oven, they came out absolutely perfect: fluffy and tender. I agree with all the positive comments on the recipe and have already saved it for next year.

The gingerbread cookie dough was hard to work with at first, but settled down with time. Some sources advise trying to keep the dough cool; our dough worked better when it had time to warm up a bit. The cookies had a lot of flavour but were not quite as crispy as I would want, so the recipe is not yet perfect enough for sharing.

Spånga Christmas market. Livelier than most years. An eclectic mixture of:

• school classes selling home-baked goods to earn money for a class trip
• cheap tat like mass-produced acrylic wrist warmers
• actual nice small-scale crafts like ceramics and jewellery
• candy
• food stalls
• scouts

It feels like Spånga scout club takes up more space every year, but it’s probably just that they’ve gotten a better spot and more presence. Chocolate wheel, gingerbread houses, you name it.

Adrian’s group was making and selling bacon pancakes (and fake-on pancakes for the vegetarians) cooked over an open fire. I can’t honestly say that it’s good value for money, but they were working hard to earn it, and a hot, greasy pancake with lingonberries went down well in this weather.

Nysse has the right idea, sleeping away a good majority of the day. I wish I could be like a bear and go into hibernation and just skip the next month or two. Wake me up when it’s light again. It doesn’t even need to be spring – just some daylight. Or some snow at least to brighten the world.

Everything is grey. It’s going to be +7°C and cloudy, with occasional rain, for the foreseeable future.

I struggle to find energy for anything. A midday walk makes no difference when all I get is dull greyness. I keep going out of discipline and habit. I get up because I always get up. I go to work because I need to go to work. I cook because I know that if I don’t serve myself a proper home-cooked dinner, I will have no appetite. I knit because at least it makes time pass.

Another interpretation of the same design as I did a month ago. Sharing the same principles, somewhat: aiming for the rectangles to be dominant without resorting to full applique, but this time allowing myself to use tulle. Lines for the ovals. Something opaque for the small filled-in oval.

It’s funny how differently we value things. The others in my embroidery group were gushing over the embroidered tulle, admiring its cleverness and unique look, while for me that was the lowest-effort part of the piece. It was like mindless doodling with yarn and thread: start at a corner, follow the structure of the fabric, “bounce” when you hit an edge, stop before there is too much of it. Almost mechanical. I literally chose it the other week because I was tired and couldn’t be bothered to be creative. I myself was much more proud of my very even feather stitch, and the woven oval as a nifty way of making something very covering without applique, and those got no notice.

Christmas baking will be happening this weekend. I’m not sure if I’ll get around to vörtbröd – probably not, because lussebullar and gingerbread cookies will have priority – but in case I do, I am all set with wort extract.

Wort extract can be bought online, and I know some breweries sell it as well. I went to Stockholms Aeter & Essencefabrik, conveniently located just a few blocks from my city office. Shelf after shelf of jarred spices, tiny vials of mysterious “essences”, and containers of all sorts of other things. If I ever need orange flower essence or dried chamomile, I now know where to go.

Less exotic, but about as unusual for me to buy as wort extract, was a small bottle of brandy. Of which I intend to never take a single sip, but it is necessary both for mincemeat and for brandy sauce to serve with the Christmas pudding.

For a couple of weeks, Nysse was particularly hungry, almost obsessed with food. Normally he gets his three servings of dry food, and cheap cat-quality canned tuna whenever he asks for it. Now he’s been trying to steal ingredients while I cook, and even try and sneak food from my plate on the kitchen table when I look away. I don’t know what it was, but I’m glad it looks like we’re leaving that period behind us.

We do generally have an agreement about what parts of the kitchen we share and which parts are off-limits for him. The sink, and anything to the left of it, is no man’s land. Anything in the sink is free for him to taste, or eat. (I make sure to keep the sink cat-safe whenever he’s nearby, and we all know not to re-use any bowl or utensil that’s been in the sink.)

To the right of the sink is the humans’ domain, no cats allowed. Having access to a small part of the kitchen counter and occasionally getting a taste of what’s there seems to satisfy his curiosity and cravings – he doesn’t normally try to encroach upon the parts that I’ve decided are not for him.

He has odd favourites. Like, everyone knows that cats love dairy: he licks tubs of quark and crème frâiche so clean that they almost sparkle. But Nysse also loves canned tomatoes and tomato sauces; grainy/mealy things like oatmeal porridge and bread dough; and – most surprisingly for me – the liquid around canned beans and chickpeas.

For Adrian, I continue our tradition of daily chocolate toffees from Åre Chokladfabrik – a mixture of their Christmas toffees, saffron toffees, and salted caramel toffees. Except this year I only fill the pockets for every other week.

Ingrid asked for something weekly instead – daily sweets would be too much sugar, and daily anything would be too much to keep up with. So she gets a classical Christmas-themed short story and a Christmas-themed loose-leaf tea every Sunday in advent.

I occasionally vaguely consider giving myself an advent calendar of my own – there are even yarn advent calendars – but always decide against it. I generally don’t want more stuff in my life, and the stuff do I buy, I’m picky about. I buy with purpose. Random yarn, no matter how pretty, would be wasted on me. Chocolates, cheeses, liqueur… yarn, seeds, whatever – same. Something like the short stories that I got for Ingrid would possibly be the only exception.

First advent Sunday.

I hung up advent stars inside, and another light garland on the front porch, and sprinkled miscellaneous Christmas stuff here and there. Now the house feels very Christmas-y. As long as I don’t look outside, where it’s +8°C and rain.

We had glögg and advent fika after dinner. Haven’t had time to bake anything Christmas-themed yet – somehow the hanging up of lights took hours – so we have fika from Spånga Konditori. A saffron bun for Adrian, and cakes with saffron curd and vanilla pannacotta and a lingonberry glaze for Ingrid and myself.

Tomorrow is the first Sunday of Advent and it’s time to get the Christmas mood going. Tomorrow is also going to be rainy, so I’m starting with the outdoor lights today.

The thuja in the garden is perfectly placed for Christmas lighting, nicely visible from the whole living room and at just the right distance. What it is not, is perfectly shaped for hanging Christmas lights. It’s very much directed upwards, not like a spruce or a fir with rounds of nearly-horizontal branches, and its boughs are quite delicate. I’ve figured out something of a technique that doesn’t bend the branches and gives an aesthetically pleasing result. It’s a hassle, involving a stepladder which I need to move several times, and a garden fork as an arm extender to allow me to hook the lights over the branches, and even then it takes me several tries for each loop.

When I had done all the work and was all sweaty and a mixture of pleased and frustrated, and put the plug in, I discovered that only about half the garland was lighting up. The rest was dark. It’s daylight, you can’t see the lights very well in the photo, but there are eight vertical lines and only four of them are lighting up.

I had plugged it in while it was still in the box, specifically to avoid wasting my time hanging up something that was not working. But the top layer in the box looked good, and enough of it lit up to give the impression of everything working, and I thought it would be an all-or-nothing situation, so I didn’t even think to check further in.

Now I had to take everything down again, do research to find a new garland, drive somewhere to pick it up, and go through the whole ladder-fork-cable exercise again. Because the alternatives – having to look at sad, broken Christmas lights, or having to put up the new ones in the rain tomorrow, or not having any lights at all for the first Advent Sunday – were even worse.

Got it done in the end, with much huffing and sighing, so now Christmas can start.

The process would be a lot easier if I had more arms. Or maybe if I had a different tool. The garden fork is big and heavy and requires two hands. If I had something lighter, I could have one in each hand, which would make it much easier to put the garland where I want it to go. With one extended hand, I’m just sort of half-shoving, half-throwing it up and hoping that it will catch on a bough. With two, I could maybe actually shape it into an arch. Hmm.

I really do not need any more socks, but I do need a background knitting project for meetings etc. Gloves are almost like socks, right? And I could do with a pair of basic, everyday knitted gloves. Something less fancy than the leather gloves I wear to town – more in style with a worn shell jacket than a fitted wool coat.

I don’t know what I was thinking. A glove is nothing like a sock! And a first glove, especially, is nothing like the 40th sock.

I can knit a sock with a standard fingering-weight sock yarn mostly without thinking. Cast on 60 stitches, knit 48 rows of ribbing for the leg, 18 rows of heel flap, etc etc. Adjust to 64/48/20 if the yarn is 420 m/hg instead of 400 m.

Knitting a glove, though? For the first time for this pair of hands with this particular yarn? It’s constant measuring, ripping up, picking up the stitches, re-knitting. The thumb took me two attempts, and the little finger took three. The polar opposite of mindless background knitting.

So now I have three ongoing knitting projects, and still nothing to bring with me to the office.