I remember I felt it was plenty time until Christmas not long ago, today is St Lucia’s day, which means we’re 11 nights from Christmas. The 11 nights is something that I remember singing when I was a kid in school around Lucia’s day, that part is also basically all I remember; “Lusse lelle, elva nätter före jul….” (hard to translate as “lusse lelle” is slang, but it would be similar to “Little Lucia, eleven nights before Christmas…”). Honestly I’m not even sure it is a real song, it could be something we just sang out as well as kids.

There’s now less then two weeks to get it all together. As of yet there’s no panic, I have gotten myself started, done away some of the “must do’s”, but there’s a few left.

I have put the ham in brine (water, salt and sugar), in which it should lay roughly a week longer. This is the traditional way to prepare Swedish “Christmas ham”, once it has been salted, you can either boil it or cook it in the oven. I usually go for the oven, that gives me the stove free for other things, like cooking up a whole lot of meatballs.

I have pickled the herring (well, I make a compromise here, I buy ready to go herring that I only need to pickle, rather then doing the whole salting it process as well). Past experience says I should not read the label, which says it’s done on 3-4 days, so this year I did it in good time.

I have gingerbread cookies in a jar, although I suspect there’ll be far less left when we reach middle of next week, which is why I saved some of the dough to go for a new round of baking them. I have done the saffron bread traditionally eaten on Lucia’s day (Lucia bun) and also a variant filled with “almond mass”; similar to marzipan but less sweet and a bit more grainy in consistency.

I have not gotten all decorations up, but those I traditionally take out a little at a time all the way until the day before Christmas eve, at which point all I have not yet done has to be done, so it is all ready when we wake up on the morning of Christmas eve, this usually means the house looks like chaos until around 2 am when I exhausted sorts the last bits and head to bed 🙂