Christmas preparations

Hey folks, lately the entirety of Norway is preparing for Christmas.

Everyone washes their floors, the windows, bakes lots of cookies and cakes and flatbread and all sorts of good things to eat. Except they make all sorts of weird things too, like rotten fish in various forms (rakfisk, lutefisk, sild). There are more good things though, like homemade bread, ribs (ribbe), medisterpølser and medisterkaker (sausage and meatballs made of pork meat), and ribberull (made from ribs I guess, but rolled with spices like cloves), smoked salmon, and other stuff to put on bread.

So far I made gingerbread that are super duper yummy and the cookie tin is now almost empty. I gave a bunch to my fiddle students at our end-of-the-year party and then somehow the rest of them keep disappearing day after day...

I also made flatbread dough on Tuesday for our Basken end-of-the-year party on Wednesday. We have a Christmas tradition of baking flatbread with the kids and it was really fun this year. They were very good at it and their parents or grandparents came along as well and helped out.
They did all the rolling-out of the dough and the other teacher and I baked them on several "takker" which are big electric griddles for which you can adjust the heat. It is pretty cool. Also, you use a flat wooden stick to turn the flatbreads (or whatever you are making, like lefse or rømmebrød, or lapper).

I am hoping to make some more cookies but I think I will have to wait until vacation. My husband and I are definitely looking forward to Christmas vacation. First he will be selling Christmas trees this weekend and hopefully bringing one back for us as well.

I will be having a end of the year party at work with the students and teachers on Monday. My class will be reading a story about "julereier" that happened in Torpo. Julereier are magical beings that come to visit around Christmas and can either be nice or mean. If you are nice to them, sometimes they will help you like making sure you always have milk or plentiful with firewood. But if you scorn them or offend them then they will be mean to you, like taking your food or making sure you never have milk, or all your firewood may disappear. But the most dangerous part about julereier is that they can fly through the air and they can take humans into the mountains with them to work for them.

In Norway it is also popular to have julekalender, which you look at every day as a way of counting down until Christmas eve. There are also "adventkalender" that are usually the same as in the States, like a cardboard thing that has chocolate in little boxes. Also, Norwegians light 4 purple candles every Sunday counting down to Advent.

I hope you all are having a good time preparing for Christmas, however you do it!
Merry Christmas!