Swedish Christmas feel in the time of tropical heat

I hate to break it to you all white-Christmas pining-Sweden-loving-conflicting-Christmas feelings-of-cold/hot/light/dark-kind-of-people like myself; Christmas in Australia will never be like the Christmases back in the winter dark of Northern Europe, in the tomteland of Svedala. And I mean never, ever. Sorry to shatter any illusions but I think we need to agree on this point before we can move forward and find peace with working out an alternative.

This, however, doesn’t mean that one can’t create a little piece of Swedish Christmas celebration right in the middle of the 35 degrees heat, one just have to be selective and smart about it. And that’s exactly what I’m going to help you to do. I will help you, step by step, to navigate Christmas in the most possibly stylish, genuine and user-friendly way I can think of. Without too much stress or anxiety.

Firstly, Christmas for me is about the senses. For me it needs to smell like Christmas, taste like Christmas, sound like Christmas and look like Christmas, even if only from the micro perspective of your home. This can easily be achieved in a not too complicated manner.

To make it smell like Christmas you need to identify those smells that make the Christmas feeling kick in for you. Essential for me is a REAL Christmas tree. Yes, the price of a semi-real looking tree in Australia is comparable to at least half a regular pine forest in Sweden. But hey, comparing Christmas tree prices with the Great North is not getting you any closer to experiencing the ‘Xmas feeling’. Bite the bullet and buy the tree, see it as your Christmas present to yourself. Inhale. Decorate your tree with lovely things from funkis or IKEA and the picture is complete. Exhale.

Secondly, I have a very weak spot for oranges with cloves in them. And the smell is wonderful, makes me twitch with Yule-feel all over. Decorate your own oranges with cloves and you will reap the benefits throughout Christmas. These decorations also make a very nice present.

Unless you are the Stephanie Alexander of Swedish Christmas cooking, know your limitations and set your goals in a realistic timeframe.

If you don’t have time to bake ginger cookies, pop into IKEA, Coles or Woolworths and pick up some of Anna’s pepparkakor. If you want to make the ginger cookies more versatile, put a bit of blue cheese, such as Roquefort or the like, on top of a ginger cookie and you’ve got yourself a tasty nibble pre-‘julbord’.

‘Julbord’. Important indeed, but let’s not go too crazy. If you can’t recreate the ‘julbord’ of your childhood, don’t feel bad, and remember, you probably didn’t eat most of it anyway. Include the best bits only. My variation is Janssons frestelse, beetroot salad, meatballs, gravlax, ham, 2 styles of herring (mustard and French for example), knäckebröd, cheese and a green salad. Everyone can add any specialities that they feel are a must. Let’s remember, improvisation is good. And no one here will know the difference. And for pudding, I love a tasty Ris a la Malta.

The key to a relaxing Christmas in the Swedish spirit is to try not to stress madly the day of the 24th of December. Most things on my ‘julbord’ can be made in advance. Prep the Jansson frestelse and meatballs and stick in the freezer. Go crazy, have it done in November! Gravlax is so easy and takes care of it self that all you need to do is turn the little parcel about twice a day for 3 days. How hard is that? The herring sits nicely in the jar, keep it that way. The beetroot salad taste better if you prep it the day before. I can’t be bothered with making my own ham, I just buy ham of the bone and schlep a bit of tasty mustard on top. The Ris a la Malta can also be made the day before and kept in the fridge under some cling wrap. That leaves you with tossing a green salad on Christmas Eve. Easy.

Glögg. I’m sorry to say this but this drink doesn’t work for me at all this side of the equator; I let it remain one of those things I only do when Christmas is celebrated in an environment that enjoys no more than 5 hrs of daylight per day. But if it makes you feel Christmas fuzzy, here’s a DIY.

In regards to making it sound like Christmas, the options are endless. In this day and age of high tech super highway kind of way of living, crank up Sveriges Radio and tune into a whole range of different Christmas feeler-gooderers 24/7 up to the 6th of January. You can of course also listen to the local Swedish Christmas variation of radio at SBS where the Swedish Programme will broadcast all kinds of Christmas songs. Or download or order some Swedish Christmas music on Amazon. Or maybe just sing some traditional Swedish Christmas music, the optimal way to get the Yule-groove going.

To get into the Swedish Christmas feel, there are not only things I recommend you to do, but there are also things I strongly recommend that you don’t do and actively stay AWAY from.

Some of these no-goes are:

Wildly blinking lights/Christmas decoration. Christmas shouldn’t be confused with a raunchy red light district. Bad for Christmas feng shui.

Any native Australian animal dressed up in Santa outfit. A definite NO. An absolute killer of Nordic Christmas feel.

And remember, don’t peak too early. Start Christmas preparations on the right side of December to minimise the anticlimactic feel of premature Christmas fatigue.

I hope this little Swedish Christmas guide can come in handy, and remember, you can take Christmas out of Sweden, but not Sweden out of Christmas, rock that reindeer!

The Swede who threw a better spanner in the works

There are so many people to thank for so many reasons, all those people who made life easier for the rest of the world population. All those people who took things one step further for the greater good of all, those people who thought “ this can’t be it? There must be more to this tool than this?!”

Well, no more sleepless nights for all you home-handy individuals who have found yourself on many occasions looking down on your personal adjustable wrench and thought “who came up with this clever tool and is it a Swede?”

Let me quench your thirst for answers. Firstly, is it a Swede? But of course it is a Swede. The inventor of the adjustable wrench, unknowingly, is the forefather of the expression ‘less is more’. While Johan Petter Johansson (1853-1943) was working as a fitter, he found himself standing in a sea of wrenches to match a whole range of screws and nuts. The confusion and frustration was evident for JPJ and being the clever sausage he was he combined the whole lot into one single tool, the adjustable nut wrench, or the universal wrench. This little piece of invention was constructed and patented in 1892. Since then, the regular toolbox contents have been more or less halved and many trades’ people’s backs have been saved, chiropractic clinics gone out of business, all due to our nifty JPJ. So inspirational has the adjustable wrench been that some people even write songs about it. Credit given where credit is due.

Shine a light on the Reflector

In these days of brightness I feel an overwhelming urge to share some warm thoughts on how good it is to have a reflector in you pocket. Any person who ever spent a winter in that Nordic country of mine will know that to make your self be seen in the dark is almost as important as having a seatbelt in the car. Debatable, absolutely, but such is the attitude of some Swedes. I don’t know of any country that has such a strong urge and an identified need to be seen in the dark as the Swede. Sure, my vast knowledge of cultures wearing a snappy reflector on their body doesn’t include the Polish highlands or the depth of the Ukraine, still I feel confident to claim that Swedes must surely be on the top 3-list of such activities.

And what a wonderful free marketing tool the reflector is! Every bank, business and promotional ‘do’ produce a reflector to hand out for free. Because guess what, there is a whole willing population of Swedes trying to be seen in the dark. Yep, one plus one is two and never has Sparbanken got so much free advertising as they do in the winter darkness of Sweden, with their logo dangling so temptingly from the pocket of a responsible Swede.

Oh, the joys of attaching a new reflector to the pocket of your winter jacket lifted your spirit as few other things did. The shapes and styles were many and the choice was often hard, but then again there are normally two pockets on the jacket so why not stick one reflector in each pocket, go crazy. So every little winter pocket of my childhood contained a piece or two of hard shiny plastic, attached to a safety pin and a piece of string. Sometimes the safety pin stopped being safe and while rummaging around inside the pocket for the reflector many small fingers drew a drop of blood or two. Often the string was a complete mess and instead of hanging freely outside your pocket and swinging while you walked, one would only spot a piece of plastic half peering out of the pocket in a choking kind of fashion, probably wrapped in the half-ripped pocket lining as well. But safety before all else.

As we moved into the 21st Century many things changed, but Swedes still like to be seen in the dark and a new cool approach to the reflector lurv is the Firefly reflectors. Stylish, fun and functional, just like your regular Swede. And why stop at saving your children from the darkness of winter, include your dog in the light-loving-reflector fest!

White cabbage is the new rocket

Who invented the Swedish pizza salad?

Who ever it was, their image should be immortalised in a white cabbage sculpture.
Pizza salad is for the visit to a Swedish pizzeria like soy sauce is to a Japanese meal – a must. And on top of it, one could interpret this glorious delicacy as a culinary expression of Swedish socialism because the pizza salad is FREE. Amazing. Or not.
The pizza salad is made by one of the cheapest vegetables there is, white cabbage. It’s a vegetable that in general isn’t going down in history as the most sensual or exotic piece of nature. While asparagus could trigger erotic ideas and the lure of phallic horizons, white cabbage draws a blank. Or, for the breastfeeding masses out there, white cabbage could, at a stretch, trigger ideas about soothing breasts riddled with the agonies of mastitis. Therefore, the likelihood of asparagus and white cabbage ending up on the same plate is not very big.

To create this delicacy, the cabbage is sliced thinly and then doused in oil, vinegar, salt, pepper and if you’re lucky, a spot of pickled capsicum. Does this sound pretty lame? Just hang in there. The salad gets better the older it gets. A bit like a nice wine. It needs time. Just not too much time because then your Grange Hermitage of pizza salads turn into bad cabbage. And you don’t want to eat that, trust me.

In Sweden, it doesn’t matter how fantastic the actual pizza is, and how cheap it is, if you don’t get offered your free pizza salad, the likeliness of a return visit to that particular pizzeria is close to zero. Sounds strange, but then again, we can be kind of strange people. So when my craving for a good ol’ pizza salad to go with my Kebab pizza gets the better of me I head to Sven’s Viking Pizza in Bondi Junction. So good is his salad AND his pizzas that the Italian Association of Pizza Makers in Australia is looking for a way to close him down. Not bad for a guy with a viking helmet. Go Sven!

Brush in style.

‘A spring clean’, what a wonderful, slightly dated expression, if you are to really look at what it says. The old idea of having seasonal cleanings, the ones where you turn the house upside down, drag everything out into the garden, devote a whole day, or weekend, to thoroughly scrub every nook and cranny of your place, well, yeah, keep the dream alive is all I can say. Perhaps something changed in our cleaning habits when the vacuum cleaner became a standard object in every household, perhaps we don’t find the time to do these gigantic clean outs any longer or perhaps we just can’t be bothered. As I often say when the dust balls tumble down the hallway like spinifex on the prairie and I’m pinned to the wall: ‘A little dirt has never hurt anyone.’ Which really just means that I can happily accept my lacking cleaning-gene that obviously wasn’t passed down from my mother.

But if I have to clean, which does happen, I like to make it as graceful an activity as possible. And this doesn’t include crawling around on the floor on all fours with a brush and pan to pick up unidentified objects. Oh no, I do this activity in style using yet another very smart Swedish product, the long handled brush and pan. It’s so simple it’s almost stupid. If it wasn’t so smart. What more can you ask for, functional and good-looking.

www.funkis.com

Homo Cyclius

While Swedes have seen the cycling light many light years ago, we are still struggling here in Australia to come to terms with the bicycle as a mode of transport, not just a leisure activity that includes a car ride, with bike on bike rack, to the park.

Bike riding in Sydney is up there with extreme sports like base-jumping. You are basically risking your life, willingly. People call you a fool for venturing out in the street jungle full of predatory machines such as cars. AND should you be so irresponsible as sticking a kid in the child seat, you could risk loosing custody of your own offsprings. This misconception could possibly be traced back to some clever car manufacturer, who knows. But let’s get one thing straight, bike riding is great. For so many reasons. And I’m not going to tell you which those reasons are; you just have to find out for yourself.

And while Sweden didn’t invent the wheel they invented bikes such as Skeppshult's wonderful machines. Second best I’d say. They are available in Australia, but you might have to pop to Victoria to pick one up.

www.cykla.com.au
Skeppshult Bikes

The Big Chanterelle Myth

It’s been a good year, an amazing year. At least, so I was told.
2009 was the year when you couldn’t help but stumble upon chanterelles in the Swedish forest. They were EVERYWHERE. No exaggeration. Even if you didn’t try to pick them you seemed to come home with pockets full of them, simply by passing through a bit of nature. ‘Greta just popped out, and lo and behold, five litres of chanterelles while picking up the newspaper from the letterbox in the morning. ‘. Amazing. ‘Janne goes out every afternoon and scoops up more than he can eat and bring to work for charitable distribution’. Unheard of. No one gives away litres of chanterelles unless they are some other look-a-like but seriously poisonous fungi found in the moss.

So to put it mildly, my expectations in the chanterelle department of success was, as far as I was concerned, a given. It was more a question of HOW many amazing litres would I be able to brag about once I came out of the woods alive after my fungal expedition. Well, my chanterelle glee soon enough turned to chanterelle desperation, before finally settling on chanterelle failure. I found one. Not two, but one. And I covered the geographical landmass of an average county. Either they were all hiding from my terribly untrained eye or as my mother gently remarked: ‘someone must have cleared this place before you’. Sure, had it been the size of an average city park. Sure. But I’m talking an area the size of Tasmania. SURELY ‘someone’ couldn’t have cleared it all before me. And aren’t they meant to grow back?! And I have to admit, that single one I found was so pathetically small that any chanterelle picker worth their woven basket would have left it to grow. But hell, I couldn’t come back completely empty handed. The shame would have been unbearable.

So my theory is that the chanterelle myth strongly resembles the fish myth, you know the one that got away? Because, seriously, has anyone ever seen these 8 gazillion litres of chanterelles that people seem to effortlessly amass? Do you actually confront someone after they told their proud and happy forest story and insist on being shown the freezer box in the basement just to verify the truth factor? That kind of behaviour results in less Christmas cards. No one likes to be doubted, especially not in the chanterelly kind of way. So you just say ‘wow, that’s amazing’ and then the story is legitimate. It’s the truth, at least as far as you’ve been told. No proof shown, no proof needed.

Still, my single premature chanterelle teamed up with a small bunch of other chanterelle misfits and became a little taste sensation of a nibble before dinner. Butter, salt, white pepper and onion. And of course that rare species of a thing called chanterelle. Together they made my day, the delicacy of rarity is a fine thing to taste. And as I’ve always said, ‘better one chanterelle on the fork than six litres unpicked in the forest’.

Why do we need a Swede?

Why do we need a Swede? They are pretty handy to have.
Just ask the Balkans. Or the Iraquis. Or the UN. When you need someone to drop in for some peace negotiations, or look for weapons of mass destruction, and you are really scraping the barrel for objective choices, searching high and low for people out there without too many stains on their national reputation. Or stains on their intern’s dress.
There is an answer. Go safe, go Swede.

A couple of favorite political pin-up boys to stir into the pot of dealing with messy situations around the globe are Carl Bildt and Hans Blix. Both did what they could with various results. Still, no damage was done to the reputation of the Swede.
Slick and smooth is all I can.

Return of the clog

Growing up in Sweden I have a very natural relationship with clogs. As a child, the clog was always the right thing to wear. Easy to put on and easy to take of. Parked next to the front door was a mountain of clogs, at least one pair for each family member. And as you might be well aware of, a good Swede takes of their footwear at the front door. Still, there were times when the clogs had to stay behind. One of those occasions was tree climbing. A tree, according to my mother, should never been climbed in clogs: ‘too slippery, darling’. The other event that had to be clog free was football (and I mean football, not rugby!). The reason for this sport to be clog free had little to do with the fact that you might twist your ankle or slip or find it hard to run. Oh no, the biggest danger with playing football in clogs was the risk of the other players. When kicking the ball your clog might fly of your foot and hit somebody in the head and cause great injury! So, us clog-wearing Swedes are very considerate people.‘But how can a piece of wood on your foot be comfortable?’ I often get asked.Well, it’s a bit like jeans. Before the pre-distressed, acid-softened, beyond-vintage, homeless-chic versions were cluttering the jeans market. I’m talking back in the ‘olden days’ when new jeans could be parked standing up by themselves in your room while you had a shower. Those blue jeans that made your thighs have a slightly sick blue tint for a couple of weeks before it got washed out. Clogs are like those good old jeans, you have to break them in, put your mark in them, and make them yours, with pride. And once you’ve done that, you can never look back. So really, every time you see somebody wearing clogs you are witnessing a beautiful thing, you are seeing a person who has domesticated a piece of wood and fallen in love.