Christmas Swedish Style

Last year we had a barbeque at our house with friends for Christmas. The kids played in a small pool and some of the bigger kids followed this up by a swim in the ocean. You could call it a typical Kiwi Christmas. This year we were looking forward to something very different. If you can believe what Tina says – ‘A Real Christmas’. Would we get a white Christmas? Our chances were definitely magnitudes of order higher compared to the last few years.

The lead up to Christmas started in earnest at the start of December. This also coincided with plummeting temperatures, very little light and the profusion of outdoor Christmas Markets popping up through out Stockholm.

We spent a day at the popular open air museum – Skansen, which is purported to have the most traditional and authentic Swedish Christmas market of the lot. It was a bitterly cold day, however this didn’t dampen our enthusiasm and we took in the stalls, ate and drank our weight in pepparkakar (gingerbread) and Glögg (mulled wine), danced to the nifty Christmassy music being played by the onsite live band, and saw fleeting glimpses of Jultomte, in effect Sweden’s Father Christmas, but in reality a short scruffy dwarf from Nordic mythology that bears only a vague resemblance to the Father Christmas I grew up with. He seems a lot more sensible when compared to Father Christmas, he knocks on the door and asks if there are any nice children instead of trying to squeeze his voluminous weight down a narrow chimney, and he isn’t that fat. He gets porridge for his efforts, which makes sense considered the plummeting temperatures, and he doesn’t hang out malls for the weeks and months leading up to Christmas waiting for thousands of scared children to sit on his lap and have their photo taken. By the looks of him, he is more likely to be hiding out in the forest eating magic mushrooms and drowning himself in glögg, which seems a much better way to spend his time.

 

Hot Chocolate at Skansen, or is that Glögg ?

Get your Julklappar (Christmas presents) here.

Dancing at Skansen

 One weekend we were invited to a traditional Christmas baking session at a friend’s house. Many a pepparkakor was made. In effect pepparkakor are very thin and crispy gingerbread, not to be confused with the thicker, softer German lebkuchen. The snow came too…finally. It was very dry snow though – the sort of thing skiers pine for and snow ball and snow men makers would rather avoid. However, it was cold and although it wasn’t exactly a big dump, it stayed and finally gave us an excuse to fit our ice-tyres to our bikes. An exciting week followed commuting to and from work on the icy surfaces and we were both pleasantly surprised at the gripping ability of the tyres studded surfaces. The cars on the streets also made a peculiar rumbling sound, they too having been fitted with the compulsory studded tyres in readiness for the perpetual winter. My rather miserable mood of the proceeding weeks – I admit I had been struggling with the lack of light a little, evapourated and my mind started planning for ice skating on the local lake which was rapidly freezing over, family snow ball fights, cross country skiing on our back door step and all sorts of new and different riding opportunities that the frozen conditions would open up. Winter… finally, bring it on.

 

Finally - some snow to clean up!

Studded tyres. The most exciting thing to happen in my cycling life for a few months.

 The traditional Christmas work-do was held in the city and consisted of a traditional Julbord (Christmas Table) that included reindeers heart among other strange meat cuts and medieval entertainment while a blizzard raged outside. Interestingly enough, Stockholmers had been advised to stay home that day due to anticipated delays and cancellations with the public transport system. Apparently despite the fact that the city often sits snow bound for months on end, and life goes on no matter what the weather may be doing, the first big storms of the winter always cause chaos. Then, it appears that the conditions are simply accepted and everything magically works again.

 

Fire breather at work Christmas do.

Julmust - a hideous fizzy Christmas drink. Together with a hot dog, the cheap and nasty Julbord of the takeaway lovers.

 Unfortunately the wintery weather only lasted a week. Annoyingly, the daily maximum negative temperatures turned positive again. Not by much, but enough to melt the remnants of the snow, defreeze the lakes and bring the gloom back. The daylight hours were actually more than I had expected – 9am to 3pm, but it was greyer and duller than I had imagined as the sun only just made it over the horizon and the rays didn’t really filter down through to the streets. When you could actually see the sun, there was no warming effect in its rays whatsoever, the sun obviously too far away to have much effect.

The one positive part of the near perpetual darkness – there is a positive in everything, was that Christmas lights could actually be seen. In New Zealand, people can decorate their houses to kingdom come with all sorts of gaudy light shows, but unless you are a night owl, they are kind of lost to the world and in reality just a waste of electricity. But not in Sweden. They added light to the long nights, and in some cases the streets. I would have expected the street lights to be powerful illuminating flood lights in a country with such a long winter. But no, they are reasonably pathetic, which is surprising. But the array of Christmas lights on display definitely help to mark the boundary between road and house in more than one part of my daily commute. Office windows (ours included) and apartment windows nearly all had the ubiquitous pyramid of fake candles lit by the marvel of electricity. Many colourful paper lamps were also on display and the colours and lights definitely helped to brighten the spirits in the darkness of the long nights. Even though I’m from the Southern Hemisphere and am used to long hot days, barbeques and beach life around Christmas time, the cold and dark and pretty illuminations just kind of felt right. But still, the short gey days were killing me.

 

Some people take their Christmas lights way too seriously.

We were both looking forward to the break over Christmas in Germany. Although not exactly renowned for their hot Christmases, we were mainly looking forward to some daylight, and of course staying at the fine Hotel Bayer. We also booked a week in Mallorca in February, a place I thought I would never go, but with the approaching bathroom and pipework replacement in our apartment complex set for the start of the January, we were looking at two months of no running water or sewage and no bathroom in the midst of the darkness with temperatures that are set to dip down to minus twenty. We were dreading it and a week escape in the middle of it to get some vitamin D from the elusive sun was too tempting.

Then we had a stroke of good luck. Friends of ours were leaving. Not that that was good luck, the opposite in fact as it takes a while to make friends in a new city, the last thing you want is for them to leave. However, considering the housing situation in Stockholm, someone leaving also opens up opportunities and the natural question soon followed “Can we have your landlords number?” A house with a small garden with a 1^st hand lease just down the road (ie. Not renting off someone who rents off someone else for a maximum of 12 months), available just when we were to be without water and a bathroom for two months. It sounded too good to be true. It wasn’t, we move in at the start of January. A nice Christmas gift for us just days before we jetted off to Germany for Christmas.

With Ana’s imminent second birthday, the flight to Germany and back was to be the last time she was to sit on our laps for its duration. Tina and I counted up the number of planes she had been on to date. Fourteen including the one we were on. Not bad for a less than a two year old. I’m not too sure if I am proud or horrified at that statistic. Ana was now old enough to know she was off to see Grandparents. And boy was she excited. She sprinted around the airports at Stockholm and Frankfurt in such a state of excitement she didn’t have time to look where she was going, the wave of bag towing fellow passengers simply parting in two so as not to inhibit her progress, while Tina and I sprinted to keep up with her.

Germany was grey but the sun felt warm and refreshing, temperatures were unseasonably into double figures, and it didn’t get dark until 5. Following German tradition we opened presents in the evening of the 24^th and snacked on Christmas bakery lubricated with wine well into the night.

Well, we failed miserably in the white Christmas department, maybe next year. More importantly, we are hoping for the winter to begin in earnest on our return to Sweden and hope the greyness becomes more of a white paradise.

Merry Christmas to all, wherever in the world you happen to be.