Yesterday first Sunday in Advent, today First of December….christmas time has finally and officially arrived! So has the first cold this winter which has hit not only the little one but also Karsten and myself. We were therefore sneezing our way through the weekend, accompanied with a lot of hot elderberry juice and ginger tea.

The flat looks christmassy, but not christmassy enough. The christmas calendar is still missing some decoration, the cookie box is still empty, the christmas cds still have to be dug out. One by one, I tell myself!

Anyway, I managed to bake some almond bread yesterday which is one of our family traditions. It’s a bread made out of flour, sugar and almonds which gets its special taste from various christmas spice that are added. For me, the smell and the taste of this bread (you can eat it like this or with butter, nothing else) is inevitably linked to Advent and christmas – it has to be on the breakfast table on the first Sunday in Advent, there is no way around it. I would estimate that my mother bakes around 30 breads each December which are eaten or given away as christmas greetings.

Unfortunately, my baking seems to be cursed. First I messed up the chocolate chip cookies I made for our music group on Friday. Then I messed up the chocolate cake for our birthday guests on Saturday. And I managed to mess up the almond bread as well since it wasn’t baked thoroughly when I cut it. That’s three days in a row!! And the christmas baking season is about to start….maybe I should think about outsourcing. Our friend’s 4-year-old daughter already found a cookie box under the little one’s bed (don’t ask me what it was doing there…) and she offered to take it home, fill it with self-made cookies and deliver it back to us. Sounds fine to me!

Nonetheless I am looking forward to some more baking and to some cosy pre-Christmas moments! Presents are already halfway done, so I am hoping for a wonderful and somehow relaxing christmas season! And I wish the same to all of you!