all christmasy pre-Christmas-time :-)

So, even Stockholm is not safe when it comes to Christmas-spirit! These happenings are not all after Helsinki, but I thought it would be nicer to have all the christmas stuff together ;-)

 

For me the Christmas time started off with a "Farewell mingle" organized by the KTH Alumni. They had a few swedish christmas traditions there. One of them is the Lucia fest, also called the light fest. Traditionally it is celebrated on November 13th very early in the morning (later more on that part). It is a tradition, to celebrate the light in this dark time of the year, since it is quite dark up north in winter. There are many party to it, who is interested can read tons on it online, but the best known part is the singing, with candles to celebrate the light and the red belt thing to honour Santa Lucia, who was a martyr. The singing was really pretty :-)

Another thing is the food. On the left you can see "Lussekatter", which are pastries with saffron and raisins. After picking out the raisins I really liked them ;-) On the right you can see "Glögg", which is warm, spiced wine, similar but not equal to the german Glühwein. And you drink it from tiny cups and put nuts and berries/raisins into it.

 

Then I went to a concert of a friend who is in a brass orchestra. It was really nice and as special guests they had two people in traditional costumes playing traditional instruments, one of them (the one the woman is playing) is the violin thingy I talked about in the Uppsala-post.

 

Then, on the 13th, there was a Lucia singing in the library early in the morning (7:30!!!). But to make up for the early time they had free Lussekatter and Coffee/Tee ;-) And the singing was great!

 

Before we went to Helsinki we went to Skansen, the open-air-museum, where they have a christmas market with lots of traditional food and crafts.

 

In the city, in the windows of the most expensive department store in town (probabaly comparable to Harrod's or the KDW in Berlin) they have really cool decorations with christmas stories, one of them of course being Pippi Longstocking backing gingerbread.

 

And here are some more impressions of Stockholm being all christmasy: