Four Days Until Christmas

It´s been raining all over my Christmas spirit. This photo is taken at 2 am yesterday but it might as well have been at 3 pm. Also, someone at the post office has "mis-sorted" a parcel of mine, and they can´t find it. Nor do they seem very interested in looking for it. It contains a 50´s watch I bought on Ebay, a kind that I have been wanting for a long time, so I am pretty distressed about it.

At least my traditional vörtbröd (a traditional rye bread made with brewer´s wort) came out smashing this year, and in triumph I carried part of the loaf to mum-in-law. She had, in spite of near blindness, made a second attempt in as many days to bake hallongrottor (literally: raspberry caves).
She showed me a tin full:
"I think this batch looks much better than the first one."
Well, I could see the raspberry, but no cave; there was a sorry pat of jam on top of a slightly burned, thin layer of flour in the paper baking cups she had used.
"I think you may not have used enough flour", I said.
"But I followed the recipe exactly!"

There was a lot more Christmas spirit at my friend Oscar´s tenth birthday bash, as his mother is a champion decorator and a black-belt shopper. She was particularly happy about the tree this year, and rightly so, I thought.

I am trying to learn how to use my camera better, and this low-light season is very challenging. As you know, the road to proficiency goes uphill and is paved with failure, and I came home with around eighty very, very bad photos. Sometimes, however, a bad photo goes so bad, it turns around and comes back kind of good in an unexpected way. This is, of course, not a sign of improved skill, but rather blind luck.

Today, I have the big pre-Christmas cleaning to do, Sunday is the big Christmas shopping day, and Monday is meatballs and ham frying day. Tuesday, it´s Christmas Eve, which is the Big Day for us in Sweden, when we eat ourselves sick and watch the eternal and obligatory re-run of "Kalle Anka och hans vänner önskar God Jul" (= Donald Duck and his friends wish a Merry Christmas). And drink liters of glögg.