Monday, January 12, 2009

Christmas Eve in Finland!

In the morning, Christina and I went into Helsinki (the capital of Finland) for a couple of hours to walk around and see if any markets were open. Some were, and I made one of the best purchases of my trip—wool mittens! Those mittens kept my little fingers from freezing! After that, we went to the aunt and uncles house (of the kids Christina nanny’s for) for some traditional Christmas Eve porridge! The tradition is, whoever gets the almond in their bowl of porridge will supposedly get married next! Christina and I were both hoping for the special almond, but we didn’t have luck. It ended up being in one of the boys’ bowls. Oh well, better luck next year. After lunch, the kids and some of the adults had a sing off on their Wii to the soundtrack of "Mama Mia." The girls were really good. I was tone deaf! The Lord did not bless me with the gift of singing...oh well, I take great pictures! Here's the porridge. 

Here is a small taste of my Swedish/Finnish Christmas Eve celebration. I wanted to upload more photos but I'm having issues and it's taking so long. I will just upload some of them to my Picassa Album, it's so much easier.
Here are the kids singing the Lucia Christmas song. Traditional Swedish!

Santa even came to hand out gifts.
Me with baby Amanda. She is a darling! It was good to get a little bit of being with kids since I don't get that here and I miss my nephew and nieces! 
Christina y yo.
Our Christmas Eve dinner, course 1: seafood. salmon. caviar-yep, I ate caviar! It was actually not bad because they eat it on toast mixed with onions and sour cream. I will probably never eat like that again, because I saw the price of caviar on the airport and it ranged from 100 to 400 euros! I know airports are over priced, but wow!! That's a lot of hard earned money!

Dinner, round 2 was ham with about 5 different sides like sweet potatoes, veggie casserole thing, potatoes with anchovies, etc.  Round 3 was my favorite: cookies and dessert! That's all for this blog. I think I just need to work on getting a whole Christmas photo album put together, uploading them separately is time consuming and annoying after a while. Thanks to my Swedish friends (and Christina) for the great Christmas! I will always remember my Swedish Christmas in 2008!

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