Candles in the Window

We put up the first of our christmas decorations on Thursday last week, having dragged down our three boxes of miscellaneous yuletide stuff from the chill of the Mañana's attic. We began with the lengths of fake-fir garland that we'd adorned last year, or the year before, with bows and with red plastic berries, and wired through with white fairy-lights. We stapled one such garland into the arched doorway that separates the lounge from the kitchen, and suspended the others in cursive ws from the banisters that delimit the lounge's upper and lower levels, and the stairs that run between them. Then we put the electric candelabras in the windows, or at least the two of them that still worked - a few had fallen defunct during their year in storage. These characteristically Scandinavian 'candles' can be seen illuminating almost every window in the town where we live:

On Friday, after a further shopping expedition, we put up the remainder of these window-lights, along with some other festive lighting: some glowing plastic snowmen, etc. On Saturday evening we assembled the artificial tree that would be positioned near the balcony door in the upper part of the lounge, stringing it with flashing coloured lights, wrapping it with tinselly garland and suspending baubles from its branches. We'll be putting up a rather larger tree, a real one, in the downstairs lounge sometime later this week. The prospect of stringing lights on to that fills me with something more akin to existential dread than seasonal cheer...

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On Saturday we tried åkerbärssylt for the first time. This is a rather costly preserve made from a highly-prized but elusive wild berry that grows in swamps, lakeside meadows, in ditches and along pathways in the northern parts of Scandinavia.

Known as arctic brambles, or arctic raspberries, these fruit make a truly delicious jam that yields a rich chord of flavours.

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I wasted a good deal of time this weekend, as I did the weekend before, on the reprehensible pleasures of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City on PlayStation2. In the game, I'm currently helping aspiring crime-boss Tommy Vercetti to set up a counterfeiting operation in the print-works he has just purchased...

Posted by misteraitch at December 9, 2002 03:39 PM