clearly not 100% coping

I felt a lot lighter as soon as I got home last night from the glögg party. Not enough lighter to check my email right away, though.

Tomorrow and Saturday are Wax's last free days before the 24th, so we will need to start baking and/or cleaning tonight.

Also there's the possibility that we may not be able to get a whole ham, or the frozen sweet root vegetable casseroles that Wax was planning to get for the feast on Christmas Eve: they were all out of those last year and we bought the ham earlier last time. I personally find the smell of it cooking very off-putting, but it's gotta cook here (even though we never buy or cook pork ourselves because of my food sensitivities) from straight logistics. It has to thaw a day before and takes a long time in the oven; the guests are coming from minimum half an hour away.

you know what I just realized is missing from Finnish Christmas

They don't have candy canes.

I was never a huge fan of them, but now I'm thinking I just never had to miss them because you can't turn around without tripping over them.

Wax says they have them in Sweden and you can totally buy them here, "like an old-fashioned thing, like at fairs," but that's no use, as there isn't a fair here. Our two supermarkets - three if you count the Prisma hypermarket (I always refer to our hypermarkets - Prismas and Citymarkets - to my family as 'like Finnish Super Target') where we did our Christmas shopping - did not have them.

I threatened to ask my parents to mail me some so Wax is now hurriedly searching the web for a Finnish source (hampered by the fact that she can't remember or discover a Finnish name for them; in Swedish they're 'polka grisar'), because it's always better to ship things as short a distance as possible etc.

It seems Finland doesn't like peppermint candy or cinnamon candy at all, actually, because they also don't have:

• cinnamon gum


• red hots (cinnamon hearts)


• peppermint drops

Cinnamon gum and red hots were some of my favorite candies as a kid. Funny that I never noticed that gap before last Valentine's day! The huge variety of high quality fair trade domestic chocolates blinded me, I guess? I've hardly eaten any other kinds of candy in the last twenty years. (There's plenty of mint gum and breath mints, but the only peppermint hard candies I can think of are Marianne, which are filled with milk chocolate ganache.)

There's a class of "spicy" candy that's named as if it is made with pepper usually here, but I've never tried it or seen anyone eating it or been offered some.

Anyway, that's a big gap in Christmas decor as well as in Christmas candy, although in general the available decor here is much more to my taste. The only other big decor that I miss are those big bulb light strings, the retro kind, and we never had any growing up, I just liked looking at them.