A nice Christmas but is so different from our New Zealand Christmases it is always a little hard. Also we are so focused on baby stuff it was easy to forget it was Christmas at all.
Little Christmas Eve is the 23rd of December and is the day you visit people and deliver presents. Also the day you eat hot rice porridge with a dollop of butter in the middle and sugar and cinnamon on top and dried salted lamb and ham on the side. I did package up some gifties and we did some deliveries and had some lovely visits (and got more delicious knitting from Tante) and came home to some packages on our own doorstep.
The main celebrating and pressies bit is done on Christmas Eve and ours was with parents-in-law, brother-in-law and Grandmother so very quiet and quite different to New Zealand where we have lots of cousins and various adopted extras for Christmas. But it was very nice and walking into mother-in-laws house finally gave me that Christmas feeling. She does a lot of Christmas decorating. A lot.
Christmas day we had some carollers - not a Norwegian tradition, but our Canadian friends - she had her three sisters visiting so the five of them carolled us and brought a selection of home baked cookies and I served them glogg (mulled wine with almonds and raisins, but mine was non-alcoholic and store bought) so that was a lovely treat. Then a dinner with the extended family - lovely, but tiring for plumpy.
I have to tell one of my favourite things about Norwegian Christmas, and it isn't morbid, but the graveyards. On Christmas Eve people visit their departed family, put flowers or Christmas wreaths on the graves and light a candle, so when you drive past the graveyards they are full of twinkling candle lights. It is really beautiful.
I am terrible at taking photos and took none so here are some from last years gingerbread house, which we didn't manage to do this year either.
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