December 23, 2020
Are you feeling festive yet? Does it feel like Christmas yet?
I have tried to get myself and our home feel more Christmas’y over the past week, but nah, today it just feels like a regular fall Wednesday. But I’ve tried at least haha.
This year I didn’t really feel like putting any decorations out, I even said no to putting the tree up at first but then decided that ok, why not. But nothing else. This year is so weird anyways plus I want to clean out things for when the baby comes, not add more crap to look at for a few weeks, hahah. Then last week I decided to put up the green garland and the lights on the stairs like I’ve done the past couple holidays, cause who knows, what IF we DO actually move within a year and what if that house doesn’t have these kind of stairs, then I would feel a bit sad that I didn’t put them up one last time. And it looks really nice, it’s very cozy at night.
Yesterday I made a Christmas stovetop potpourri. Our home definitely smelled like Christmas.
One orange, ½ cup cranberries, 3 cinnamon sticks, about one spoon of cloves and 2-3 cups of water.
Don’t laugh at me but I used dried cranberries instead of real ones, simply because we have a package of almost 2 liters of dried ones at home and I didn’t want to buy something new. I let it come to a boil and then removed the lid to let the smells out in the apartment. I always forget how smelly cloves are, it can sometimes give me a headache, but I think this was the right amount now. Not sure if you’re supposed to smell the orange or not, which I didn’t, but it looked pretty:) Should last for 4-5 days I read. I’m just gonna leave it in the pot and warm it up whenever I feel like we need more Christmas spirit in our home:)
Today I plan on baking us some saffron treats. I feel like testing making saffron muffins cause I’ve never done that before and buns is just too much work. But Jim seems to want me to make the buns (I’ve made them a few times over our years of marriage) so we’ll see.
We went to one grocery store yesterday and got most of the stuff we need for this holiday but we still need to go to another store tonight. Jim happens to be really busy this week for some reason (normally slow before Christmas), he’s just constantly in meetings and working long days, so I have to kinda adjust to do things whenever he has time. Like yesterday we went to the store in the middle of the day cause it fit him better.
Christmas isn’t until Friday but since I’m Swedish we also celebrate tomorrow and the festivities starts already tonight, called uppesittarkvall. So tonight we will have some irish coffees (non alcoholic and decaf of course) cause that’s a tradition from my parents and maybe I try to find this Swedish movie that I used to watch on the 23rd every year as a kid, but we’ll see. Tomorrow we will watch Donald Duck at 3 pm like always and enjoy a saffron and chocolate ‘fika’. Then we’ll have ham with a potato gratin. On Friday we’ll probably gonna open gifts (we only have two that we got sent from J’s mom) and then have cornish game hen with maybe potato or something. We don’t feel like making a whole turkey again, this hen is perfect size plus we will have tons of leftover from the 24th.
We have lovely weather these days, a bit warmer. It’s going to be even warmer tomorrow but unfortunately rain all day. Oh well. We spend our days mostly inside anyways:)
Happy Holidays!
Thor in the scarf I knitted for him a few years ago
During winter you have so much to wear that it’s easy to forget something…like your facemask.
Luckily no people outside at this time, and I covered my face with the scarf when in the lobby of our building (mandatory face covering)
Just look at Thor, haha, enjoying the sun 
Thor’s paw prints in the snow, so cute
On Saturday morning we drove to Mianus park but the parking lot was full so we couldn’t go hiking. Instead we drove to a small but cute park nearby. We let Thor off leash and he had so much fun.
