Christmas message

Merry Christmas! Maligayang Pasko!
God Jul! Ho ho ho!

In the Swedish Christmas tradition, a Christmas gnome, not Santa Claus, gives the gifts to children on the afternoon of Christmas eve. An even older tradtion with pre-Christian roots say that the gifts are delivered by a male goat, the Julbock or the Yule Goat.

Whoever or whatever delivered your gifts to you on your side of the world, I wish you had a happy day full of friends and loved ones around you.

There was, needless to say, no Rudolph outside the window yesterday at midnight. The pictures were taken today, Christmas day, and the deer were actually raiding the bird food.

The original picture:


They stayed a long time there, oblivious to us humans inside the house. It was a nice Nature show on Christmas.


God fortsättning! - Have a good continuation of the season. Tomorrow is Annandag, literally the second day of Christmas!

The Glass Jar Tree, a.k.a. Into the Wardrobe part 2

An accidental passerby to the last blog entry "Into the Wardrobe" commented that I should have posted more pictures. Oh boy, reader demands! I hear you though, and I was meaning to post more pictures anyway, along with a story. As in frozen Narnia, the heroes observe something peculiar but interesting in Norrköping. They're not frozen fictitious animals though, and there was no Witch offering Turkish delights.


This story takes place during one of our walks, on a clear sunny day. The snow had newly fallen; the snow is dry and crisp on the ground and it crunches when you walk on it. The snow keeps cold, but the sun warmed our exposed faces.

On this day, we decide to walk around Himmelstalund field, a recreation area quite near here. In the summers, people play rugby and football there. Many sunbathe there on summer mornings and grill with their friends on summer nights. It also lures campers and tourists. The field, you see, though near the city center, had remained open despite decades of construction for one reason: a flat rock ridden with Bronze age rock carvings, smack in the middle of the field. The rugby players and sunbathers go on with their activities there, perhaps more or less aware that people 3,000 years ago have also been playing and camping right where stand. Perhaps there is a chance that they might have descended from them? The Bronze Agers, anyhow, would probably not recognize the field as it were today. According to scientists, they lived in a different, much warmer Sweden. The landscape might have no doubt looked much different; who knows if the trees and plants they knew exist in Himmelstalund today?

On this day, however, there were no rugby players, sunbathers, or tourists to the rock carvings. Neither was it warm. It was just us there, a couple of skiiers, and a foot and a half of snow.


I noticed something glimmering in the sun, just about where the rock carvings should have been. As we walked near it (which required some effortful walking on the thick snow), we realized that the gleaming things were glass jars, hanging from a tree!


Is it street art, like the knitted "lamp post warmers" which I blogged about two years ago? Whoever did it obviously put some thinking into how to hang the jars. No doubt the artist would have needed a ladder! I bet it felt a bit like decorating a Christmas tree.


Like the lamp post warmers making regular lamposts noticable, the odd jars hanging about made this tree worth walking to. It suddenly made that tree stand out from the rest, or at least tickle curiosity. It also has a name for me now: The Glass Jar Tree.

Perhaps it grows pickles, marmalade and mayonnaise?

The end.

Into the wardrobe

In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, children Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy walk into a wardrobe and suddenly find themselves in a frozen world on the other side. Sometimes, I think that's how it feels to walk out the apartment building door. The warm and toasty indoors can make you forget that it's a cold and frozen world out there.


Last week, when these two pictures above were taken, it marked the coldest day here (as yet) at -15 degrees C, after having snowed heaps, too. And the snow looks like it's here to stay.

Despite the cold, we made walks – sometimes around the river, about 3 km, to longer 8 km walks. A little exercise, as long as you listen to your body's limits and allow for rest, is good for both body and soul, so we have made it a point to walk almost daily. Just going out at all into the outdoor icebox feels a bit inconvenient at first, but once we're out, it feels fulfilling. I tick an item in my mental checklist that says, "Take a walk today", and that feels good.

If nothing else, the winter landscape definitely is pretty, and it changes day per day. When it's very cold, snow crystallizes in the branches, making them white. Newly fallen snow looks as smooth as fondant on the flat ground and tops everything from hedges to cars and park benches, making everything look like giant marzipan figures. On most days, the sun hides behind a thick layer of clouds, but when the sun does come out, the ground and snow-covered objects gleam with a copper tone. Today was one of those days:


The snow-and-ice landscapes are ephemeral, transitory. The next time you see it, the immaculate blanket of fondant-snow will surely have had tracks on it; the snow heaps might have changed shape in the wind and sun; the frost on the branches would have shed. And you think about how incredibly lucky you are to have seen that landscape just when you did, just when it looked like that.

On a less romantized (and rather exotified?) view of snow: Snow has to be ploughed from the streets and from yards so that cars, baby carriages, wheelchairs and people can pass (of course). The streets have to be salted or sanded, to avoid slips and falls. We with balconies are obligated to keep them free from large amounts of snow that could weigh down the balcony or cause icicle-danger to people below. And when you think about it: overall, we're talking about a lot of snow. I collected two sink-loads of snow from just outside our balcony door last week so we could open the door. I took some from the window sill too to have an unhindered view outside. Imagine the snow that has to be ploughed from yards and streets! Imagine all that water floating around in the atmosphere to create this! Then again, that thought is probably not so new if you live in a land of typhoons and recurring floods. We just get them in frozen form.

Looking beyond the black dog

Lake Ågelsjön in the beginning of November

December 1. Another whole month had flown by in the blog world, but it feels rather that we trudged ‒ TRUDGED ‒ through another long month. November is otherwise anyway the gloomiest period of the year in Sweden: dark, wet, vanishing sunlight. Our attempts to go back to "normality", as we call it, couldn't have been more ill timed. The normality at the end of October didn't last, for many reasons. There were just really bad days this past month ‒ crushing, pressing and immensely tiring days where our spirits just seemed to deflate. Some days seemed to weigh so awfully. The language of gloom is so suggestive: weight, deflation, crushing. You feel quite literally weighed down. But the language, I'm afriad, doesn't quite get so close as to capturing the feeling, when every single day and hour feels like a Sisephean task.

But December‒ it will surely bring something new? Things seem to be turning again for the better and time seems to be chipping away pieces of what just recently felt like an unbearable burden. Marcus is feeling better pychologically, and I am on leave for the moment, to give myself a rest. We're getting somewhere, I guess. Activities seem more meaningful again. Heck, I've even gone back to blogging.

Today, I want to share pictures of an early November walk we made just before things started to get us bogged down again. Marcus was feeling mentally tired then but (lo and behold! It's Marcs after all!) he walked the fastest, always 10 meters in front of us. The spirit is in there somewhere. After this past month, I realized that we have it somewhere in us after all to put one step ahead of the other, even if each step might be so heavy as to feel like a trudge. My mom has a wheel-analogy to life, you know: You get bogged down sometimes, but once you're out of it ‒ and you might need a push from others ‒ things get rolling.

Here we are going up through a fissure on a rock on the way to a lookout point at Ågelsjön. Mom and dad and we walked here last summer, so it was nice to walk there again, this time with Mats and Margareta.


Once up the fissure, you're rewarded by a beautiful view at the lookout point:


Swirls on a twig: the beauty in the small things:


Hopefully I'll be back here in the blog more often now ‒ and we can continue to see things again with wonder.