Jun 22
It's also a celebration of fertility and that's why around noon on Friday we will be dancing around a phallic pole, doing a traditional frog dance with a crown of flowers on our heads. WHAT IS NOT TO LOVE ABOUT THAT?
Nothing has changed. Not one thing. Maudy Thursday is still about witches. There is not a single chocolate easter egg to be found. There's still snow. We're still eating Christmas food at Easter. But one thing has changed.
"Oh, so what, at the end of the egg hunt, the kids will get ONE cardboard egg filled with candy instead of proper chocolate eggs all delivered by a rooster not a bunny, well that's not very exciting..."
As darkness still reigns outside, we all gather in the main house ready for the Christmas festivities to start. We will eat Christmas porridge sprinkled with cinnamon, chat about the day ahead and drink coffee and tea.
And I'm hoping to be waddling in a winter wonderland as Sweden at the moment is, well rather warm. There is not much snow around so most of the country is looking not at a white Christmas, but at a grey one. Luckily on Saturday we are flying north to Norrland, to celebrate Christmas with our family in the only part of Sweden to be pretty well assured of a flurry of snow.
Although at this stage, the raspberry caramels (which look absolutely gorgeous in the recipe picture!) may just turn out to be caramels as we have been to 6 different shops and cannot seem to find the all import dried raspberries. As it is now Friday, I'm either going to spend tonight picking out dried raspberries from our breakfast muesli or we will have to have raspberry caramels sans raspberries!
The kids did enjoy it and got to go on a few rides but the thing they were most excited about was the purchased of 2 big helium balloons and once TSH had had some rum in his hot chocolate, he was excited about having to look after them too.
The normal Thanksgiving tradition is that the girls spend the day cooking and chatting and the boys do their thing. Well that was until 5.5 children popped onto the scene, so now the girls will spend the day cooking and the boys will run after the 5 little girls that they helped procreate.
Complete with it’s own castle and lake, Tyresö park made the perfect choice for our Extreme Swedish Midsummer celebrations. Everyone else in Stockholm thought so too, so the park was packed with thousands and thousands.
loulouloves 