December 30, 2019
Good Morning! I really hope you guys are doing well and that you had a wonderful holiday celebration, whether it being Christmas or Hanukkah or whatever. This year we decided to stay home just the two of us (three with Thor), no fuzz, just relax, snuggle, eat food, play board games, play with Thor, go for walks and watch movies. Nothing special but that is very ok with us:)
Jim decided to work from home on Christmas Eve, so I made us a nice breakfast with bread, different kinds of cheese, mandarins, juice, coffee and rice pudding. In Sweden it’s common to eat rice porridge around Christmas but that’s not something I feel like making from scratch, so a couple of years ago I started to buy rice pudding (which kinda tastes the same, just a bit sweeter) as a substitute for that.
While my hubby was working, I prepped the afternoon food, cleaned up in the apartment and started the dishwasher. We went for a long walk with Thor, such a lovely warm sunny day. At 2pm we were skyp’ing with my parents and my super pregnant sister. In Sweden we celebrate Christmas the 24th so they were kinda in the end of their celebration, just watching some tv while digesting the food haha.
At 3pm, just like every year, we sat down to watch Donald Duck. I’ve written about this before, it’s something we all do in Sweden, a 61 year old tradition.
And then we cooked the rest of the food. Very simple and not too much this year. Ham, potato gratin, beet salad, boiled eggs, dark bread, cheese and “prince” sausages. Never making meatballs on Christmas again (we got food poisoning 2014) and I couldn’t find Abba herring, and for some reason we didn’t have anything green on the table this year, but I think our dinner table turned out pretty good.
At night we just played games, gave our gifts to each other, played with Thor and his new squeaky toy he got from Santa and listened to music.
On Christmas Day, I once again made us a nice breakfast and after a calm and long morning, we drove to Tod’s Point in Old Greenwich for a walk on the beach. Seems like everyone else had the same idea, parking lot was full. But it was very nice, lots of kids and dogs running around. We walked around the whole island, about 3 miles, Thor did so well. Back home we made biscuits (aka pop the package, put them on the pan and cook in oven for 15 minutes hahah) and had leftovers from the day before. I can’t really remember what else we did that day haha. Just listened to xmas music, Thor got another toy to play with, I was figuring out how to use my new toy that I got from Thor (Samsung Active2 Smartwatch), we face-timed with Jims mom, Annelise and little Sam, we watched basketball on tv and played games. Easy peasy lemon squeezy.
Jim went to work on Thursday, worked from home on Friday and on Saturday we brought Thor over to Daniela, Gareth and baby George’s house in Rowayton. We had an amazing lunch of Italian pasta with meatballs, some baby snuggles, played fetch with T about a million times, was served an apple pie and a traditional English trifle that Gareth was excited about (G is very good in the kitchen), played UNO and after a whole day there, we were all pretty beat, Thor didn’t even care about his dinner when we came home, he just went straight to sleep all night long haha.
It’s quite nice to not having to do much on the holidays. Sure, I would have loved to see our families and relatives, but this year we kinda recently did (not the most fun gathering since it was for a funeral, but still) and I’m going to Sweden to meet the new baby in about a month. We’ve had a tough year and even if we were on vacation in November, J and I really needed some time alone.