swedenusa

Tonite we go out with friends and help bring in the New Year! After the parties and the restaurants ect…people go to the city park and watch fireworks. It is snowing now for the first time this season. It should be interesting to see how many show up! Hope 2008 is a great one for you all!

As I wrote in my last blog, our plan was no Christmas food, no gifts, just relaxation. The thing is we sort of had a change of heart. We were in the grocery store on Sunday afternoon to buy food for the holiday. Looking around we both felt the urge to go traditional on the food.

There we have it, specialty suasages, meatballs, ham, special Christmas pop. Some items are clearly missing but we got the basics. Sam wanted crackers and cheese because that´s the tradition in his family. Of course a lot of candy, chocolate and cookies (thanks to Maxima). We made some phonecalls talking with family so we still felt connected. All in all, we had a good time.

For those of you who can´t read Swedish I have to share this story from my sisters blog:

My sister and her three year old son were watching the Grinch who stole Christmas (Jim Carrey). When they started watching it had already been going for a while, but my nephew got into it and understood the premise. Suddenly he started to cry. My sister thought that he most have become scared of the scary looking and mean Grinch. She shut off the sound and carried him to the bedrum. As she was holding him in her arms trying to comfort him and asked “Why are you crying honey?”

“I feel so sorry for the green cat. I feel sorry for him because they don´t want him”

How wonderful to be on Christmas break. Time off. This year could not be any more different than last year. Sam and I are celebrating by ourselves (not to be confused with alone). We decided to not have a Christmas tree, not buy any gifts, and not any traditional Swedish food. Just calm, peace, contemplative.

I really expected no gifts too, but we have a few laying on our table waiting to be opened. My coworkers gave me a little giftbag with goodies and from across the ocean came homebaked cookies from Maxima. The thoughtfullness overwhelms me!

I think most people start to think about the year that passed and what they would like to be or do next year. Every year at this time most people go through a mini-existential crisis. We evaluate the meaningfulness in our lives, think about resolutions.

This year I am allowing myself to go into these thoughts and feelings fully. I am reading Tuesdays with Morrie, and I am going back to writings and books by C. S. Lewis. I write in my journal (which I do about 2 or 3 times a year)! I do for myself what I do for my clients. I specify what it is that I want to be, what I think is most important. Then I write down what I do and how I act that reflects what is most important. I write what I want to do more of in order to get closer to the core of things. Finally I tell myself what one act I need to do every day. Simple things! Not complicated stuff. I try to make it easy for me. Not change major parts of my life all at once, which would make it likely to fail.

I try to take one step in the direction I want to be and after a year or maybe several years I will hopefully find that the little correction will have put me in a spot far away from the road I was going.

So no resolutions just some tweaking and sharpening. Just making myself more conscious of what I am doing and what I am not doing.

Here is a qoute from Tuesdays with Morrie:

“So many people walk around with a meaningless life. They seem half asleep, even when they are busy doing things they think are important. This is because they’re chasing the wrong things. The way you get meaning into your life is to devote yourself to loving others, devote yourself to your community around you, and devote yourself to creating something that gives you purpose and meaning.”

I have to add that I can be doing all those things and still not get meaning into my life. We have an ability to make concrete things so abstract. I look at our manger (with the gift knocked out of the wisemans hands) and I thank my creator for making what we make abstract into something very concrete.

(pictures were taken in October)

I am pretty sure that it didn´t really happen back then but it was tragic in a funny kind of way when it happened now. When I came home from work one day Sam told me that he have to glue one of the pieces together from our manger set. I think he was a bit worried over how I would react because I really like this set, mostly because the cow looks so funny with his eyes popping out. At first Sam was heistant in telling me exactly what had happened. Well… the star fell on top of the wise man and I think the myrrh fell out of his hands. The ironic thing is that it fell ontop of the poor magi that already has his back crooked, sort of bent forward, hands extended, as he is offering his gift…

Maybe there is an object lesson in here somewhere, about giving and receiving, hands extended, being humble???

Obviously I got batteries… or rather, I found some in a drawer. Usually you can find stuff you need in what is commonly known as the “junk drawer” where pretty much everything gets tossed when you don´t know where else to put it or don´t have time to put it where it belongs.

I took out our camera and started to arrange some items for that perfect photo. As I turned on the camera the annoying “change batteries” message was blinking in the viewfinder. We don´t have any batteries at home of course and we never did buy those reschargeable once. Hmm… good Christmas gift idea!

The plan was to blog about first of advent. That is today, Sunday. We have special candleholders for 4 candles. We light one candle each Sunday leading up to Christmas. This weekend most everyone scrubbed their home, washed their windows, put up Christmas curtains, Christmas decorations, stars or special candles in every window.

So did we! Even the Christmas table cloth is on the table. I wanted to show you some of that but it will have to wait. I just have to get some batteries first!