We celebrate Christmas on the 24th, also known as Christmas Eve. Here's how it goes:
At around 11 a.m. we have rice porridge. There's an almond in the batch, and whoever gets the almond on their plate will be lucky the next year. Guess who got the almond? :O It was me. (Although my mom put two almonds in it this time. But still)
The Christmas tree was brought in in the morning of Christmas Eve.
There's this children's show on tv called "Santa's hotline", where children around the country can call in and speak with Santa. And sing a song to him. And after that they show The Snowman. It's a British animation from 1982. Apparently it's been shown on Finnish tv every Christmas Eve morning since 1983, and I've watched it most Christmases since I can remember. So that's definitely a Christmas tradition for me. And probably a lot of people!
After that, right before noon, there's another thing on tv that a lot of people watch on Christmas Eve. "The Declaration of Christmas Peace". It's apparently some ancient Nordic tradition or something. But anyway, the thing is in Turku, and some guy reads the declaration from an old-looking scroll, standing on the balcony of an old house. And there's a choir and an orchestra there and they play and sing a few songs, and also there's thousands of people there watching it. Plus a million watching it on tv.
After that we just hang out, decorate the tree, prepare the food for dinner and stuff!
The central element of the Christmas dinner is the ham:
Unfortunately I forgot to take a picture until after we had already mauled it... And it was GOOOD! Yum yum. Yum.
My other favorite is the smoked whitefish... Yum.
My portion (but I took seconds and thirds): ham, potato, salad, whitefish, "liver box", "rutabaga box".
Ok. Liver box (maksalaatikko) and rutabaga box (lanttulaatikko) are direct translations. Laatikko = box. That just refers to the shape of the dish that it's commonly baked in.
Liver box consists of liver, rice and I don't know what else, but it's good. :D And it's baked in an oven. You can see a little of it on my plate there, it's the brown stuff between the orange stuff and the fish.
Rutabaga box... Well, first of all, rutabaga is the American term for the vegetable. For some reason the Irish call it turnip, which is crazy, because turnip is a completely different vegetable! You can't call two different vegetables by the same name?! So I'm calling it rutabaga. Anyway, the box contains rutabaga, flour, syrup... spices and stuff... I don't really know, I haven't made it, but it's sooo good. Some people hate it though. But it's yummy. It's the orange goo on my plate. Delicious.
A couple of the Karelian pies we made with some salmon... Also VERY yummy.
And this is the dessert. I'm not going to attempt translating the name... but it's a "soup" made of dried fruits, like pear, apricot, prune, apple etc. And it's served with whipped cream. Mmmm.
Some Christmasy flowers, candles and the thing hanging from the ceiling is called a himmeli. I don't know if there's an English translation, but in Swedish the word himmel means sky/heaven, so it's got something to do with that. I would guess this is another Nordic Christmas tradition.
So we had dinner around 5 pm, and sometime after that we opened our presents.
Later in the evening I took a Christmas sauna with my mom! First sauna of my holiday, by the way :o Weird that I waited a week.
It started snowing the night before Christmas Eve, and the snow flakes continued flowing down all day long! It was only like -1 or -2, and the sun wasn't shining. (Duh, if it's snowing, there'll be clouds.)
But the next day it was really pretty! Here are some photos:
It was snowy and sunny and about -4. Perfect weather for skiing! So we went for a short ski trip (you can't even call it a trip, it was like 30 minutes) with my mom.
I used my mom's old skis since I don't own a pair of my own anymore.
Here we go!
On Christmas Day we had the same dinner as Christmas Eve. There was plenty of food.
On St. Stephen's Day (or Boxing Day or whatever you want to call it, the 26th of December anyway) there was a huge storm in Finland. It mostly hit Southern Finland, and the electricity and water were out from like 200 000 homes. I'm sure Sweden and Norway are affected by the same storm.
We only got a bit of the wind yesterday, but we got to keep our electricity and all, but today, on the 27th, there is ANOTHER storm :D and this time the wind is even harder here and it's snowing sideways. But it's supposedly a bit calmer than yesterday's storm.
That's not a very clear video clip but that shaky white stuff is snow. :D (And the sound in the background is the television.)
