Hope you and your family have a wonderful day.
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Hope you and your family have a wonderful day.
Merry Christmas Forgotteneers!
Merry Christmas everyone :)
Merry Christmas and a Happy Hanukkah.
Merry Christmas! Time to eat way toooooooo much fun. :)
DEATH TO KUFFAR SANTA.
ENJOY YOUR NEW YEAR.
Hope y'all had a good Christmas. Epiphany marks the end of the holiday season and I must say I'm not yet ready for it to end.
For me, the holiday season is usually a time of quiet reflection and steadily increasing levels of mys. It begins in early December, with everyone gearing up to slow down. Work moves at a different pace and life begins to feel a little less dreary. The work-week is dotted with pleasant events such as Christmas lunches, advent-fika, St. Lucy's Day, end-of-year meetings, the Christmas Calendar etc. Here in the North I am usually spared the intense and at times suffocating materialism that characterizes the holiday season in Sthlm and I generally feel more and more at peace.
This year, however, it was also a time of mourning.
My paternal grandfather--my last remaining grandparent--passed away a week before his 93rd (or possibly 95th) birthday, which we believe would have been on Christmas Eve. His outward appearance and mannerisms seemed strict and severe, but my memories of him are of a kind man who wrote me often and gave me good advice and encouragement. He was more serious than "grandfatherly", but, in my mind, his face represented the entire concept of "grandfatherhood". By all accounts, he was a man who followed his own path and acted with integrity in every matter, even when it came at great cost in terms of the approval of others--including his own family. He married my grandmother against the wishes of both their families, an example later followed by my own father. I'm told he had to move away for work during their courtship but, every week, he'd travel back to visit my grandmother, even though he had to swim across a river to do so. He was well-liked and respected by his neighbours and he raised his family from extreme poverty to a comfortable upper-middle-class life. I last saw him ten years ago and I guess that's my greatest regret, that I did not visit him again before he passed.
A week later, one of my maternal aunts passed away, after a long and increasingly painful struggle with poor health. She was jolly and kind and nearly as good a cook as my mother, with pickles being her specialty. As a child she was fiercely independent and active, and enjoyed horseback riding, an uncommon activity for women to engage in, in my home country. Her husband reneged on his promise to enable her to go to college but they seemed to have had a happy life nevertheless. In her later years she was unhappy and her family was plagued with difficult conflicts. Her last year was sad and full of pain and anxiety, but she had some good weeks as well and, during one of those, my mother was able to visit her and help make things better. Had that not been the case I believe my mother would have been more devastated than she was.
These sad events notwithstanding, the holidays have been good. This year, the Ginger and I celebrated Christmas on our own, because her family was off travelling. Though I love hanging out with them, being on our own was also extremely pleasant. We made huge quantities of delicious food and spent a lot of time cuddling on the couch in front of our first TV, watching all sorts of garbage (Hearthstone videos 50% of the time). I have had a lot of time off from work even though this was the employer's Christmas, so to speak. We went to sthlm and celebrated NYE with good friends as well as with my sis and her BF (who were visiting from West Africa). I'd missed them both. We celebrated our birthdays twice, once with our mum and once with our dad and our half-sisters, and I was taught a new card-game: continental rummy. In spite of the sadness, this was perhaps the most joyful Christmas break I've had in years.
Food-wise these past few weeks have been absolutely amazing. For Christmas, the Ginger made traditional dishes such as pickled herring, venison meatballs, eggs with roe, a kind of thin almond tuiles, etc. I deboned, stuffed and roasted a duck that we ate with Bengali flatbread (that I've finally gotten the hang of) and Mandarin pancakes. We've made duck soup, elk-neck soup and oxtail soup, and rendered large amounts of various kinds of fat that will help make our food delicious for many weeks to come. Nothing makes me feel as prosperous as surveying my vast wealth of gelatin and rendered animal fat :o
As for loot, we've been quite restrained. The TV (bought on sale) will be our present to ourselves and each other. No major presents for our families. We received a few gifts for our birthdays but we've been trying to establish a tradition of not spending a lot on gifts for each other. The Ginger got me a heavily discounted subscription to The Economist, which I'm very happy about.
I've had four long weekends in a month and my schedule has been extremely airy. I'm just enjoying myself right now and intend to make the most of the last weekend of the holidays. God fortsättning :)
Sorry for your losses Minx :(