Winterwonderland

Finally a little snow in Stockholm. I really waited for this all november long. Now it feels like a wonderful winterland, everything outside in white and shining Christmas decoration up in the trees and behind the windows. Whole Sweden is counting down the days until the 24 of december; there's a serie in TV, that shows 10 minutes of a Christmas story every day. This year the story is about a family from the stone age that travels to the future and wants to invent Christmas for making the winter less dark and cold. It's pretty funny to watch those short parts of the serie every day and see how the stone age people invent all the things which belong to a Swedish Christmas nowadays. The whole Advent-time seems to be very important for the Swedes. As soon as december started, everyone took out candles and lights in starshape to decorate the house and the garden. Even in school you can find candles on the tables in the cafeteria and Christmas songs playing in the speakers at breakfast and lunchtime. As I already told in the previous post, you eat a lot of delicious sweets (such as gingerbread) during the winter. This weekend Karin, David and I made "Lussebullar": sweet small buns with safran and raisins. They tasted heavenly. Now the time to learn some of the Swedish Christmas songs has also come. On next tuesday will be an AFS event, where we exchangestudents from Stockholms area will sing some songs for our hostfamilies and contactpeople. And on friday the 13th is Saint Lucia's day. I'm looking so much forward to experience this special tradition. However, there will be a lot more wonderful events and feasts next month, so I guess it's better I tell you more about each one afterwards. Have a nice Advent! :-)

 May I present you: our garden as a beautiful winterwonderland

 My very first Lussebullar. They don't look as professional as Karin's when she showed me how to do it, but they were delicious anyway.

Here I coat the buns with egg, then they were ready for the oven.

By the way: we didn't cut the rest of the birch tree. It's now a place for the bird house I won in the fishing competition I told you once about. Looks a little bit like in "Pettersson and Findus", doesn't it? :-)