Sometimes, christmas just happens to be a little bit earlier than expected! This morning, the postman rang and brought us an amazing parcel from Finland – amazing not only in its size but also in its look (seriously, why can’t other countries design such awesome parcels as well?).

And while I was tearing up a little I am pretty sure our friends teared up a bit too when they dropped the parcel off at the post office and realised the postage 🙂 See, one of the very few disadvantages of living in Switzerland is the postage! Sending parcels to and from Switzerland is just ridiculously expensive. Which is mean because I love sending letters and parcels and I am suffering quite a bit because I haven’t been able to send proper birthday parcels to my friends simply because the postage always exceeds the value of the actual present. If someone sends us a parcel it’ll be a one-time-only thing because they will be too put off by the postage to do it a second time. This is what happens if you live in a country that sits in the middle of the EU without being part of it…Which is also the reason why we have brought our personal family-run import-export service almost to perfection (three cheers for our relatives living close to the border).

But the parcel from Finland today…Wow! Although it was hard to wait until we were all gathered together this evening I managed to keep it unwrapped (and un-sat and un-stood and un-broken which was even more challenging) for the whole day. So this evening at dinner time we had a little pre-christmas gift-giving moment and basically unpacked a complete Finnish christmas season!

So much good stuff! Christmas tea! Christmas coffee (with cinnamon and cardamom). Ginger bread. Little christmas figures. Christmas chocolate. Blueberry tea. Finnish jam. And and and…..

We feel incredibly blessed to have such great friends in our live! And we sincerely hope that the postage didn’t reduce your next week dinner plans to bread and butter. You guys are awesome and you made our day!!