I don't know about you, but lately it seems as though I'm living in perpetual darkness. When I wake up in the morning it's dark. As the day progresses, the sky lightens somewhat to a dirty grey and even if the sun fleetingly appears, it is pale and weak. And by three in the afternoon, it's dark again.

When the greyness of November is over and the Christmas lights are twinkling in the increasing darkness of December, your mind turns to baking - well mine does anyway. I love the traditional buns that are made here for Lucia day (December 13th), the saffron giving them a cheerful golden glow that helps brighten up the darkness. As with many yeast based buns, they are best eaten freshly made on the day you bake them. In these modern times, we can bake them and freeze them as soon as they are cool, taking what we need and zapping them in the microwave to restore their aromatic goodness.

It's not easy to be the apprentice baker around here. I feel the master's presence breathing down my neck (and we all know how good he is!), but despite this I was determined to make the Christmas saffron buns all by myself. Little did I know that the kitchen appliances were plotting my downfall. Paranoid, me???

These buns are easy to make and I've given the recipe before. I was confident as I happily measured out and sifted the flour, ground up the saffron with the sugar and a little alcohol and heated up the milk and butter and crumbled in the fresh yeast. I added the wet ingredients to the flour, switched on my mixer and..... SILENCE. Not a sound. Not a movement of the beaters. I frantically checked the power point, I jiggled it a bit and even threatened it, but all to no avail.

The master baker, hearing my wails came to the kitchen and kindly took over, handmixing and kneading the dough expertly and putting it under a cloth to prove. We then turned our attention to the renegade mixer. We only bought it one year and one week ago! As I said that out loud, I got a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach - "Oh no, please don't let there be only a one year guarantee!" I howled (yes, I'm a real drama queen). And where were all of the guarantees, anyway? I hadn't seen them since we moved. Fortunately my cool headed Swede went to the desk drawer and in a jiffy was back with the TWO year guarantee! While he rang the shop we bought it from in Nynäshamn to check their return policy, I rolled the buns into their lusse-shapes, added the raisins and left them to prove a second time.




It seems that there was good news and bad news. The good news was that yes, we could return it. The bad news was twofold - we had to return it to the Nynäshamn branch of the shopping chain (I hate you, Konsum!) and that they no longer sold them, so we had to just get a refund. We are going up that way for Christmas, so we can get the money and leave the machine. But that leaves me mixmasterless. This was a pain because it took me a while to find the machine I liked and I wasn't looking forward to searching all over again.

But search we did, thanks to the internet! While the buns proved, we looked at what was available at the appliance shops in Sweden and I finally decided to get this Bosch machine. It was a similar price to the machine I was returning and would seem to be of a similar size. So we searched for the best price and found it in a tiny electrical shop in Borensberg, a small town nearby. While Lars-Göran rang them, I ducked into the kitchen, brushed the buns with beaten egg and popped them into the oven to bake.




Good news. They had one mixer in stock! So I mentioned that we could pick it up in the morning. I had read about two Christmas markets at Brunneby and Skänninge, so it would work in really well as Borensberg is near both of these towns. We'd have to get going early to go first to Motala for an errand, then to get the mixer and after have the day to mooch around the markets. Before he could object, the oven timer rang - saved by the bell yet again! *runs quickly to the kitchen*




Hmmmm..... fresh saffron buns that we just couldn't resist sampling. Despite the earlier panic, they were light, fluffy and so, so delicious. But I was very good, sharing only the one with Lars-Göran and cooling the rest and putting them in the freezer all ready to enjoy in the coming week.

Coming as I do from Australia, I'm very much a warm weather person, so it is somewhat cruel that fate sent me a man from a country where reindeer roam free and Santa spends the off season.

Today, I'm celebrating the anniversary of my arriving here seven years ago on a dark, cold, grey, misty and blustery winter's day.




When I left Adelaide back then, I remember wondering about how cold it would be in Sweden, though it was low on my list of prioities, as I was filled with both relief at getting everything done in time and anxiety for relocating to the great mostly unknown. It has been an interesting seven years with something new nearly every day.

Relocating from say Adelaide to Melbourne isn't the same as expatriating to a place where everything including the language is utterly different from anything you've experienced before. It's a radical change even when you know what to expect. I hadn't had time to prepare myself for most of the issues that face expats and it was at least a year of difficult times and difficult language classes.

As the wind howled and whistled through the bedroom window that first night, I started to wonder why I couldn't have fallen in love with someone from the Maldives or Fiji. :) We spent the next six months moving to Nynäshamn, buying the boat, renovating the old boat for selling and taking Swedish language classes, so I didn't really have a lot of time to ponder the depths of the insanity of moving to Sweden until midsummer and by then I found that I had grown quite fond of this small corner of the Nordic lands.

I don't really have any words of wisdom or insight on being an expat because I have seen that nearly everyone has a different experience. Adjusting to Sweden has been difficult at times and easy at other times, but it hasn't been dull. You can prepare yourself for the larger obstacles, such as the language barrier, but the little things like not finding peanut paste or vanilla essence where you expect to find it in the supermarket are what will send you into bouts of petty despair. The dark, foggy days of November sneak up on you when you aren't looking, too. It has been a few years of challenge and adjustment but I am now at the stage where Sweden has become as familiar and comfortable as home. I do still enjoy the newness of everything which people don't get the opportunity to enjoy very often in life, especially now that world is becoming a smaller, more familiar landscape all the time.

Lately I've seen a lot of the use of the word "expat" to mean people who move from one country to another. When I first saw the word, 10 years or so ago, I thought it was just a word for an immigrant/emigrant. Nowadays I see it used a lot by Americans here, and the usage seems to have differentiated from "immigrant": the people who came from the third world to the civilised world tend to be called immigrants and the people who move from one civilised country to another tend to be called expats.

Does the word "immigrant" have so many negative connotations now that people need to find another word for "nice immigrants"? Or is there something else at work here? Historically, this is not that case: expatriates were considered to be people who had formally renounced citizenship in their native country. So why do we refer to ourselves as an expats instead of emigrés or immigrants?

Expat, is a bit of a funny word. It conjures pictures of embassy cocktail parties and the international jet set which, I can assure you, is not at all what 99.9% of expats might experience. I'm not even sure if I have a dress and a pair of suitable high heels for cocktails at Fortress Australia in Sergels Torg (aka Aust. Embassy) if they had parties. The quaint idea of expatriate life being a high society affair has in reality been replaced with armed guards, locked doors and a grimace. I'll hazard a guess that the word expat, given the grim reality vs. the lofty image, will gradually change towards a less romantic notion when used to describe someone who relocates to another country.

So then there's immigrant. It evokes the image of the Titanic full of Irish peasants jumping around in the hold or a group of Mexicans sneaking across the US border into a country where they can get paid $1 an hour so people can buy cheap produce. The romantic age of immigrants has long since past. When Australians speak of their ancestors, they don't say that Grandpa who came out from Greece was an expat, they say Grandpa was an immigrant. I don't think that people are forced to be immigrants as that would make them refugees. It's certainly a puzzle.




Anyway, whatever I am, I think Lars-Göran is happy to have me here. Today he came home with this pretty flower arrangement that really went a long way to describing how I feel. It was an Amaryllis, the typical Swedish Christmas flower, wedded with Australian greenery in the form of the characteristic rounded leaves of the juvenile snow gum. All intertwined with a silver thread. It spoke volumes to me - I'm looking forward to the next seven years to see what it will bring.

I like the season of Advent.

It's like a candle lit in the darkness. A reminder that there's still light, love, hope.

It's this feeling you've got while anticipating something good and beautiful. It isn't there yet, it hasn't come - but you already know it's there. And you know it will eventually come. And it does not matter anymore when or how. It will come.

It's about everything you ever wanted to know.




Our first Sunday of Advent was spent in Stockholm this year. We took Annelie home and visited Lars-Göran's son and fiancé in their new apartment in the northern suburbs. It's a lovely, spacious ground floor flat with an outside patio area, ideal for their dear little Jack Russel, Milou. Emilie had decorated for Advent, with paper stars, advent candles, which created a beautiful, restful, homelike feeling. She had also made Lars-Göran's favourite frozen cheesecake, which brought a big smile to his face.

We then went to my mother-in-law's apartment to help her set up her advent decorations, which took nearly the entire evening as she has a lot of different bits and pieces to put up - electrical lights, stars, Advent plants, ornaments, curtains, candles, doilies and table linen. Naturally FOUR of the advent lights (similar to this) didn't work, so we'll pop out and get replacements for her in the morning.

When it was all done, we toasted the Advent with hot mulled wine and slices of panettone before falling gratefully into bed.

Now the real countdown to Christmas can begin in earnest!