Tag: family

Once upon a December

I know we’re twelve days into January at this point, but I’m not not posting the last monthly update of the year, when I actually managed to stick to this project for twelve months!

This December was a strange, chaotic and emotional month. It was the month of last semester’s batch of exams, the month of getting in a few more weeks of work at the library, and the month of driving home for Christmas, which is, and will forever be, my favourite thing in the entire world.

This December has held Christmas concerts, learning how to bake krumkaker, time spent (and cherished) with wonderful friends and with my family. It has been Christmas concerts and study sessions and getting through my “law module exam” in one piece. It has been a month of dinner parties and coffees with friends old and new; a month to look back on with fondness.

This was also Oliver’s, my nephew, very first Christmas, and so it holds a special place in my heart.

So, though a bit late, here’s my one second every day from the month of December 2019!

Aaaand as we’re already wrapping up December, it only feels right to pop the complete 1 second a day-2019 film here. So here goes; the 6 minutes and 16 seconds that make up 2019. What a year!

Have a wonderful day!
-Andrea

Journal #19, Bottling Christmas in a jar and a microphone

I’m sat on a spindly-legged chair in a yoga studio turned concert hall for the evening. A Christmas tree is standing in the corner, covered in nothing but soft white fairy lights, there are jars with sprigs of pine on the tables. I have a mug of tea in my hands, bigger than my face and am warming cold December-fingers on Turkish apple and cinnamon.

Christmas concerts are like being invited into someone else’s Christmas; into the music they turn up on the radio during ginger bread house construction, the songs they sing while toasting marshmallows in the kitchen fireplace of their family home.

You can hear the care and the love that people weave into their Christmas shows. No song is a coincidence, the set is list curated with northern stars and candle light. You can feel the Christmas pyjamas and woolen jumpers in the air on more quiet, cosy songs, and the wind against your cheek as you rush down a snowy hill, rolling, tumbling, on songs that embody more fun.

I’m not sure what songs I’d put on the set list of my own Christmas concert. There are too many songs to choose from, unless you want to keep the audience seated from today and right up until Christmas morning.

Image by congerdesign from Pixabay 

I wouldn’t know how to show someone else the smell of my parents’ house during Christmas, how to convey the sounds of my family home in celebration, of the quiet excitement, the chatter and the peace of Christmas eve in our house hold. How do you make people feel the weight of that one knitted blanket that accompanies every Christmas film, or the chess square cookies my mum always bakes?

The good thing though, is that most likely, everyone else have got that too. They’ve got their own songs, their own smells, their own tastes which makes Christmas Christmas, and come to think of it, that’s the whole point, isn’t it?

So I think for now, I’ll hold onto my mug and sit back on my spindly-legged chair, and stay seated in someone else’s Christmas for just a little longer. I’ll listen to the Christmas the musicians on the stage wants to convey, and even though it’s not my Christmas, it’s a very beautiful celebration, indeed. I’m so excited to go home to my own, to travel towards Christmas and my family which I haven’t seen for a while. To travel to where I know what Christmas sounds and smells like, and where I know exactly how the New Year will be rung in.

I’ll go back to where the feeling is bottled in those jars we bring out every year. I’ll be home for Christmas.

-Andrea

10/12 of the way!

Okay, I promise I won’t start this post with “how has October come and gone already, this year is flying by so fast!” but I guess, by saying I won’t, I allowed myself to do it anyway.
October’s been a strange and busy month, with lots of traveling, a lot of assignments and uni work and thankfully, some wonderful moments with good friends.
The weather has also made it perfectly clear that we’re reaching the last months of the year now, as the winter coat has been dusted off and there are no valid reasons to not put on mittens and a hat before leaving the house. Secretly, I’m really here for it.


October has brought along:

  • Two trips back and forth between home-home and uni-home
  • My mum’s birthday and thus a lot of cake, lovely food and family time
  • Some wonderful bonding time with my little nephew
  • Oliver’s baptism – which was a fairytale in itself
  • A lovely trip to the place my sister’s husband is from and getting to know his family better
  • Learning a new craft! (It’s called Hardangersøm, a type of traditional Norwegian embroidery, and I love it!)
  • A lot of beautiful concert experiences at The Church Music Festival in the Cathedral
  • A lot of studying, assignment work and exam revision
  • Some very productive study sessions with Trine, plus a lovely weekend with her lovely family
  • Halloween spent binging Netflix-shows and eating all the sweets that no children came to collect

November, bring it on!
-Andrea

“Aeroplanes and rationing cards”

Her mother threw birthday parties on rationing cards,
dressed three children in the living room curtains,
and sent them to bed with a kiss on the forehead.
Her father lived only in the stories,
the captain that went down with his ship,
the war hero.

Sixteen years later she stepped ashore where her father set sail,
trying steps after crossing the ocean that took him,
three dresses and a Bible in a tattered suitcase.
Governess by day, she told tales of foreign forests
before sending new children off
with a forehead kiss,
Lady in the evenings, at Dr Flemming’s dinner parties,
keeping her kisses to her chest like cards.

When the words for hands and home and country were of no use anymore,
they slowly slipped away.

Sixty years later, I get off the plane
in the country she no longer remembers.
Her memories are smoke signals no one can read,
but I look to the sky to try
anyway.

When I reach the sea, I put my hand in the water,
I feel the cold against my skin,
how it circles my fingers, my palm.

In a pocket with fraying edges
I’ve still got her rationing card.

-Andrea

Journal #13, The magic of the Ginger Bread

The sound of family that haven’t seen each other for too long fills the living room. Bright smiles, Christmas socks and the smell of gingerbread cookies in the oven. Gingerbread dough is snuck into mischievous mouths, tongues stuck out at whoever dares point it out – quick fingers coated in flour and butter, sticky but sweet tasting, just how these December days are supposed to be. It’s the annual family gingerbread day, where we bake enough cookies to carry us through the winter; when the house smells like cinnamon and cloves and ginger and dark, shining syrup; when the stereo churns out Christmas song after Christmas song, every single one linked to a memory, a party, an evening or just a moment.

Worries about presents and that last exam are gone as the third musician of the night sings songs about chestnuts and fires and Jack Frost nipping at noses.
These Christmas traditions are things we all share. The Christmas Crazy that sets in every December 1st and makes young and old suddenly crave satsumas and mulled wine and all the other things you never even think about during the other eleven months of the year. The Christmas Crazy that sometimes leaves you running about endless shopping centres, but just as often reminds you to sit quietly by the window to listen to the whispers of snow gently falling.

Eleven people are gathered around the table, cups of coffee and tea are lining the window sills. The table isn’t for coffee cups, the table is for working. There shouldn’t be enough room for everyone to roll out their dough, to stamp out gingerbread angels and stars, but there always is. Around this table, there is room to grow, there is space for everyone. An evening like this one gathers us all, and around this table there is room for quirks, for habits and traditions, for the weird and for the wonderful, for emotions, for the happy.
We sing along, we dot our noses with flour. We taste the cookie dough and revel in the smell wafting from the oven. Everyone’s hard at work, and like every year, Christmas comes running when we invite it in.


Like every year, the magic of the Ginger Bread ensures that the Christmas fairytale stops by our house too. Like every year, the Christmas Crazy ensures that Christmas hangs up its coat and takes off its shoes, and makes itself proper at home.

-Andrea