Merry Christmas!!

Merry Christmas!!!

In Sweden, Christmas Eve is actually the bigger holiday and is filled with drinking, eating, gift giving and cartoons. Yes, you heard it correctly. If anyone wants to invade or take over this country, you only need to wait until December 24th at 3pm. You could literally walk through immigration without so much as a peep from the officers because most likely they are away watching these cartoons. I think what is so interesting (at least with my Swedish family) is that the cartoon clips they show are from the old Walt Disney classics such as Cinderella, Snow White, Lady and the Tramp and sprinkled with other Walt Disney classic cartoons such as the one where Mickey Mouse, Goofy and Donald Duck lose their jetstream trailer on the mountain. Oddly enough, the clips of these classic movies are all that the Swedes see. Most of them have never seen any of the movies in their entirety.

Today has been spent relaxing by the fire and taking a nice walk through the neighborhood with Reagan, Gunilla and Jan. It was nice and warm yesterday, around 45F. Today, it is below freezing so burning the fireplace is very welcome. Normally, Anders and I fight about when it is OK to have a fire - in Dallas it had to dip below 50F. This rule was established after Anders built a fire and it was in the 60s. I had to turn the AC on just to survive it. HA!!!

Gunilla and Jan will stay the night and I plan on using my new Les Creuset dutch oven ti make dinner (thanks Mom & Dad)!!! I hope everyone is enjoying their holiday. It may be a few days before I can post some pictures. Since we are housesitting, I can't really upload anything onto their computer and our computer was infected with a few viruses, so I need to pretty much reload all the windows applications. OH JOY...oh well, I've got some time.

Much love to all my friends and family!!

Monica