The Lambshank Redemptions - Swedish/Australian Christmas

It is not every year one gets to celebrate a semi-genuine Swedish Christmas one day and a semi-genuine Australian Christmas the day after. This year, as you might guess, we did.

Our great friends Matt and Naomi are here. They have finally and definitely left Ireland and are on their way home. The stop-over here in Edinburgh is the first leg on their journey home. All in all the trip home is planned to take 3 months and next on the list is the Czech Republic then Turkey, India and finally home to Brisbane, Australia where their respective moms and dads are ready with home cooked meals and lots of TLC.

Anyway, on Christmas Eve we went to a nearby supermarket to stock up for the days to come, and no expenses were spared for the occasion. Once we had lugged home the loot I started whipping up my Swedish Christmas dinner. On the menu: Glögg- or mulled wine- and Pepparkakor, cooked ham with mustard on the side, smoked salmon with a parsley sauce, sausages, home made meatballs, potato salad, a normal green salad and Swedish hard bread – Knäckebröd. In my opinion, and not to toot my own horn of course, it turned out great!


The next day, Christmas Day, Matt took the helm and cooked an absolutely fantabulous Australian Christmas dinner that made my Swedish equivalent look like something out of a soup kitchen.

The feast consisted of white bread, olive oil and Dukkah for starter, a main course made up by a huge leg of lamb-roast, a potato bake with cheese and garlic, and a leek salad along with a tasty, tasty sauce. For desert we had a flambé chocolate cake. Divine!



Obviously there are now lots of leftovers circulating the Harrison-Helin mansion, which inevitably leads to constant snacking, but I guess that is what Christmas is all about. We'll just let the Wii Fit pick up the slack later.

Our guests are out meeting up with friends tonight and me and Shaena are just taking it easy, quietly celebrating our first anniversary as a married couple. Love you honey! The last big thing this year will be a New Years party at our house. I don’t think this year could end any better!

Oh, and more great news! Tonight I got a text from an old friend from Sweden that I had completely lost contact with years ago. They say Christmas is the season of wonder and magic. On that note, I will leave you this time by quoting Billy Mack:

I feel it in my fingers, I feel it in my toes,
Christmas is all around me, and so the feeling grows
It's written in the wind, It's everywhere I go,
So if you really love Christmas,
C'mon and let it snow.

Mer Jul - Classic Swedish Christmas song

H-MEN – The next generation

The good news just keeps coming! It is official, we are pregnant! For those of you who didn’t already know: Yay! We are so happy and proud we could shout from the rooftops!

Today we had our first scan, or ultrasound, and we are proud to say that Baby-H is 69mm tall and has a good heart beat. I am also proud to say that our little boy or girl will be the 20th generation, that we know of, in the Helin family tree. My dad has done extensive research and tracked us back all the way to 1425. Imagine that! I have added a few pictures of the little one and a picture of the family tree as well. Click on it to enlarge it.

We will definitely keep everyone posted on everything that will be going on with the baby and more.

2 pieces of good news

So, today was the last day at work before the Christmas holidays, and last day at work for the rest of the year. Sweet! Today I was a bit of a rebel again, yes I know, I am bad ass. I wore jeans to work on a Monday. Yikes, but don’t tell anyone!

Anyway, here are the 2 pieces of good news:

Number one: I got a pay raise out of the blue. Cash is always appreciated and welcome. Please take note and remember this on my birthday, or any other celebration or joyous event for that matter.

Number two: I also found out who the guest speaker at kick-off in Athens in January is. It is George-friggin-Bush senior!! THAT is going to be cool. Not that I am a fan of any of the Bush-administrations, but hey! After all, he was the most powerful man in the world, so I am looking forward to it. A couple of years back they had Neil Armstrong, first man on the moon, and that would of course have been even cooler and definitely more inspiring, but I take what I can get. As Shaena is going to the kick-off as well, or at least to the same hotel, I am going to have her on stalking-duty outside Mr. President’s room. That video camera we got will come in handy for sure!

Here is a link to the hotel we are staying at: http://www.astir-palace.com/en/

I GOT A WII FIT!!

So Peter was right...you definitely can't out run it. However I couldn't find it when I had to do the scavenger hunt around the flat. But man was I excited when I got to open it!!!! WOOOOOO!!!! Now he is running around the flat playing the Wii Jog. Its pretty cute! Oh and to watch Peter hula hoop is a sight. So adorable! This is definitely a great purchase for those of us that are not necessarily gym gurus.

Anyway, 2 more days and we'll have news to announce to more people!

x

So exciting! She is going to love it!

I have hidden it in a good but casual place, so she will just stumble across it and go nuts! Shaena is going to absolutely love her Christmas present... let's just say; it's the Christmas present no one can out run... you'll hear from her when she found it!

Wanna bet?

How to celebrate Swedish Christmas:

Things You’ll Need:
Christmas Gifts
Advent Calendar
Televisions
Christmas Trees
Candles
Hams

Step 1: Remember Lucia on December 13. She was an Italian saint who was killed for her religious beliefs.

Step 2: Attend a procession called "Lussetåg," which is led by someone dressed as Lucia. Known as the Queen of Light, she wears a white dress with a red sash and a crown of candles on her head.

Step 3: Begin your celebrations with the start of Advent, four Sundays before Christmas. Light one candle every week to mark the coming of the holiday.

Step 4: Watch television and listen to the radio to find out the theme of this year's Advent calendar. Have your children use the calendar to count down to Christmas.

Step 5: Cut or buy a Christmas tree. Some families wait until just a few days before Christmas to decorate it.

Step6: Decorate your home with evergreens and with Christmas flowers such as poinsettia, tulips and hyacinth.

Step 7: Plan your big celebration for the day of Christmas Eve.

Step 8: Prepare a smorgasbord for your family that includes "Julskinka" (Christmas ham), sweet-and-sour red cabbage, meatballs, "prinskorv" (small sausages) and "gravad lax" (salmon with dill).

Step 9: Serve "Julgröt," a Christmas porridge with one almond in the recipe. According to tradition, the person who gets the almond in his or her portion receives good luck for the coming year.

Step 10: Make "glögg" - or "gluhwein" - a favorite Christmas treat of mulled wine. Serve it with pepparkakor (gingerbread biscuits, see below for recipe).

Step 11: Watch Disney re-runs on TV at 3pm.

Step 12: Expect Tomten (Father Christmas) to arrive later in the afternoon with gifts for the kids. Each package will have a riddle attached, offering clues about the gift hidden inside.

Step 13: Gather your children on January 6 for the Christmas tree plundering. They will dance around the tree as you take it down and throw it away.

The countdown has begun…

… or as a famous Swedish glam-rock band once sang it: ”It’s the final countdown!”. I am sitting here in the couch in our living room, my girl is sleeping on the other couch, and I am realizing that the year is coming to an end. There is only 16 days left in 2008 and only 7 more days until the well deserved Christmas holidays!

Speaking of numbers, it's only 11 days left until our 1 year anniversary on December the 26th. Imagine that, it has been a whole year since those crazy fun weeks in Orlando!

My wife and I are impatient by nature, so we could not resist giving each other our Anniversary-gifts, and keep in mind that year 1 is the “Paper Anniversary”, so tonight I got this amazing large poster that Shaena had crafted on the internet out of hundreds of small images which together formed one big picture of us all dolled up in our Sunday outfits! It was perfect, and I am very lucky to have such a thoughtful wife!

I, equally creative if I may say so myself, gave Shaena a newspaper front page in the “Ireland’s Independent” that I too had crafted on the internet, showing our wedding photo and an article about our life together so far. Spoiling the fun with premature gift-opening is a pleasure only reserved for us, so I will post a picture of the pictures on or around the actual anniversary. Humbug! – You might say, I say it is necessary to keep our readers coming back for more.

I have to say, in all seriousness, it is not until recent years I have felt that the end of the year is actually something exciting. When I was younger I think I felt more regret over the things that I didn’t do, than gratefulness over the things that I actually did do. Now, I don’t feel any regret at all. Everything I wanted to do this year, we have done.

Maybe I am getting older and wiser, most likely I am just getting older, but I really do feel that 2009 will be one of, if not THE, best year in my life. Why is that, you might ask. Only time will tell, but I have a gut feeling that something beautiful is going to come out of this…

Oh, and did I mention; the guest list for 2009 is already starting to build up, so if you are planning on a visit to Casa Harrison-Helin, time to get crackin’ n’ packin’! Next on the list, and our last guests of the year are Matt & Naomi, our fun-lovin' Oz-friends from Ireland.

Another week, another visitor...

We are now well passed 20 guests since we moved to Edinburgh and we still really enjoy the company, and it gets us out and about as well. This time it is our friend Meghan from Kitchener, Canada, who we met while still in Ireland. She is 50% of a very funny sister-duo, and if you have a look at our old blog, there are pictures from our last “Dublin big-meet”.

Meghan is here on a spur of the moment kind of trip, nothing really planned, but I am guessing she will do a whole bunch of the touristy stuff most of our visitors do. An advantage for her is obviously that she has been here before and has already seen some sights, so she can take her time, chill, and just hang out.

Tonight is girls-night at Mrs. Thomson-Cantwell’s place, so I am by myself. I actually quite enjoy it from time to time! Work is kind of end-of-year hectic right now, therefore it is nice to just zone out and watch some random National Geographic’s show. God I am getting old!

I am also reading quite a bit right now. Basically, I am hooked on my new book ‘Slash’ which is the autobiography by Slash from Guns ‘N Roses. Not entirely sure why I am drawn to these rock-biographies, but I think it is all the different things these people have experienced, not to mention all the debauchery; thrashed hotel rooms, drugs, filth, petty crime, money down the drain, and the list goes on.

Always interesting to read about other people’s madness, isn’t it? Most of all I think I enjoy reading about the story behind all my favourite songs though. Feels kind of good to know who the girl in “Sweet Child O’ Mine” really is and where the idea for “November Rain” came from. Probably just me being a goof.

Anyhow… I’m off. Ta!

Dear wife, please come home!

...X-factor is not the same without you!

My dearest Shaena is now up in the air, flying home to me. I can not wait!

"So kiss me and smile for me
Tell me that you'll wait for me
Hold me like you'll never let me go
cause I'm leavin on a jet plane
Dont know when I'll be back again"

New rule: From now on, 1 week apart is maximum. No, make that 4 days.

It's all fun and games until someone sings Delilah!

So the boys came to town this last Thursday and as custom calls for when 4 Swedish guys meet up after not hanging out for over a year, we partied, hung out and did some off-the-beaten-track touristing. It was awesome, funny, tiring, decadent, brilliant, wasteful and sometimes even a bit stupid, but it had to be done.

It is always hard to re-cap a whirlwind, but I think the pictures will speak for themselves. We actually did other things besides partying as well.

Here is a list:

- Touristing - I got to be a guide!
- Joke-shop shopping
- Second hand store clothes shopping
- Guitar Hero playing – not as much as I wanted, I must say!
- Squirrel-chasing by the castle
- Creating a Turkish-haggler-album
- Dinner
- Involuntary pool with a Scottish guy you wouldnt say ‘no’ to!



Michelle: This one is for you!



When Sunday morning came, I was knackered and did not follow through on my promise to show the boys off on the train station. I simply pointed them in the right direction from my bed. Well done me! Reports tell me that the trip home was horrible for self-inflicted reasons.

So, again, I'm just gonna let the pictures do the talking. Enjoy!

My turn

Well I guess it is my turn to add a little tidbit on to our new and improved blog! Well I'm currently in Winnipeg visiting friends and family before I start my new job on the 1st of December. It has been a pretty sweet month though as I took my final 2 week holidays at my previous job then went back for 5 days and now have another 2 week break! SWEET!
Missing my husband like crazy but having Skype is a godsend but getting used to the time difference is tough. I keep waking up at 5am and thinking...oh I can call Peter...but nooooo....he's at work :P

Other than that I am sitting in my granny's kitchen with my cousin Em and Grandma while we get Julia ready for school. She is a slow poke I tell ya! Seems that she is liking her new school quite a bit though so that is good.

Well I'm gonna go visit. Enjoy Peter's blogs below...they are fun to read!

"Det börjar lacka mot jul..."

It's inevitable. Christmas is soon upon us, once again. I took my first baby step in to the holiday spirit today by making myself a hot cup of coffee and brining out the good stuff: Anna's Swedish Pepparkakor (crisp gingerbread cookies). It was so good! Supposedly, you are not supposed to eat too many of them cause that would upset the stomach, but I am a bit of a Pepparkakor-rebel that way. I didn't care.

Recipe for Pepparkakor:

Swedish Pepparkakor with dinkel

400 g regular white flour
200 g dinkel/spelt flour
300 g sugar
250 g butter, at room temperature
125 g cream (35-40% fat)
125 g dark syrup (molasses should work fine)
7 g baking soda
7 g ground cinnamon
7 g ground ginger
4 g ground cloves
4 g ground cardamom
4 g ground bitter orange peel

Mix all ingredients until you have a smooth and supple dough. Divide into two or more smaller pieces, flatten into discs and wrap in plastic. Keep in the fridge for at least a week. When you're ready to bake, heat the oven to 175°C. Remove the dough (a little at a time) from the fridge, and knead until it's softened. Roll out on a floured surface, and use a cookie cutter to make shapes. Place on a lined baking sheet, and then bake for 6-8 minutes, or longer if you want them to be very dark.

Man, that was a long week!

I tell you, it is not easy being in a cog in the corporate machinery sometimes. This week, it felt like I had worked my five days already on Wednesday, but by then there was 2 more days to go. I have been hosting visitors from Sweden in the end of the week on top of all other activity, and that can definitely take the best out of anyone.

I am definitely not complaining though, especially in times like these when a lot of people do not have job to go to at all, and also because I have moved in to another fast-paced versatile role in a multinational environment.

Last night I took my fellow colleagues from Sweden, my Swedish support team, and my boss Ron out for dinner and a Murder & Mystery tour.

We usually do things like this within our company to break off the sometimes dull meetings and corporate chit-chat with a few laughs and a relaxed environment.

It was definitely fun and as I am a fan of historic trivia, this was another good tour of the Edinburgh old town and its dark and gruesome past.

Well worth it... especially since I didn't pay for it myself!

I am quite tired now, and will enjoy every second of this weekend.

I will miss my dear lovely Shaena a lot though, but we'll webcam and Skype and chat and call... Thank God for modern technology!

"The boys are back in town!"

I just found out that all my boys from back in Sweden will come visit in a few weeks! Lots of fun to expect! Unfortunately Shaena will be back in Canada, so she will miss the guys, but hey, there will be lots of opportunity to hang out later on.

I will happily take the boys out on the town and show them around, and we now also have 2 guitars for our Guitar Hero game, so I can imagine that we can expect a rockin' time! Maybe we can even put the old band back together for a weekend! … Yes, that’s right, once upon a time me and the boys started a band, Pastor Runar, for fun, but that is a whole other story.

Also, the pictures from the roadtrip are up.

Oh, and Happy Guy Fawkes Night everyone!

“Remember, remember the fifth of November,
The gunpowder, treason and plot,
I know of no reason
Why the gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot.”

Stolen from Wikipedia: Guy Fawkes Night is an annual celebration on the evening of the 5th of November. It celebrates the foiling of the Gunpowder Plot of the 5th of November 1605 in which a number of Catholic conspirators, including Guy Fawkes, attempted to blow up the Houses of Parliament in London, England.

Pumpkin pie and awesome treats

Like being spoilt rotten before and during the road trip was not enough, when we returned back to Edinburgh, it continued. Michelle and Shaena kept on holidaying but I had to go back to work for a few days, and every day when I came home there was a fantastic rustic home cooked meal waiting for me. Items on the menu that spring to mind are huge steaks, roast chicken country potatoes, pumpkin pie, cheese cake, cold beer. Literally miles away from the car-staurant!

Thank you very much Michelle for that, and thank you for dressing Shaena up in a fantastic dress, and for getting us all the useful stuff for our home, and thank you for my book and DVD, I am really looking forward to both of them!

I guess now we'll go back to our normal life for a little bit before more exciting guests will visit, and definitely more exciting stuff will follow...

Next on the list of guests: Tobias and Marcus from Sweden, and then Meghan from Canada. I can only say; Stay tuned!

Pampering and roadtripping

It is November and both the summer and the fall whisked away. It is getting cold and Scotland is not as pleasant as it could be. Good thing we have a visitor though! Michelle is here and she is pampering and spoiling us like mad!


So far, we have completed a fantastic roadtrip from Scotland all the way down to Wales and back, all in just 4 days. We started off here in Edinburgh with a rented Peugeot and our first stop was Hadrian’s Wall in northern England. That is a place we have had on our list of things to see for a while, and it was very impressive!


We also stopped at a random, but absolutely gorgeous church and snapped a few photos and danced in a graveyard. Hrmm. The next stop was a chippy-lunch in the car (and a new word got invented: Car-staurant) in a little town called Brompton before continuing to our first overnight stay: Blackpool!

It was an experience, alright! Blackpool is a holiday resort for the Brits, and it is like traveling back in time for 20-30 years and it was all about neon, drinking and gambling, but not Vegas style. Blackpool was a dirty place with lots of stag parties and kids running around everywhere. Responsible adults like we are, we stayed away from the main drag and checked out an Irish pub instead and a live band called ”One Hand Clapping” or something like that.

It had been a long day’s drive, so we went to bed in our respective (pink) rooms in the pink B&B we had found earlier in the day.

Oh, and did I mention that “Canadian Idol-Michelle” made an appearance in the hotel bar earlier that night? Video-evidence will follow…


The next morning we drove off to Windsor to have tea with the queen, but first we stopped in Oxford to have a look around and made it to Alice in Wonderland’s shop, and the famous Christ Church. What an amazing town!



We got to Windsor in the evening and treated ourselves to a good nights sleep in a Premier Inn hotel. Windsor was a very nice town also, and the castle was just astonishing! Of course we did the whole tour with audio-guide and everything, but the queen was nowhere to be seen. Rude! I am happy to say we managed to videotape the Queen’s Guards, the Beefeaters, shouting “Make way for the Queen’s Guards!” when someone stood in their way. Not every day you get to experience that!

After Windsor, we hopped in the car again and drove to our next destination on the list, Stonehenge. Other names for the same place according to Michelle are: Stonehedge and Hedgehog. We got there just before closing, put it truly was a magical place! Thousands of years of history and no one knows for sure what actually went on there. Definitely worth a visit!



We continued to Salisbury, a medieval town with a famous cathedral, and found a Pizza Hut where we had lunch and checked out another cathedral before swiftly moving on to Swansea in Wales, where Shaena managed to haggle with a hotel and get us a bargain prize on our rooms. Well done!

The reason why we went to Swansea in the first place was to switch over Shaena’s driving license from a Canadian to a British one, so early in the morning we headed over to the DVLA to get it done. We found the place, Shaena hopped in the photo booth to get a new photo for her new driving license, and so the bureaucracy rollercoaster was on its way!

From previous experience we know that dealing with governments is not the easiest thing in the world, but it all worked out in the end.





After the DVLA, we decided to check out Gower outside of Swansea and an old castle and a beach. Said and done, we found the castle, spoke to Terry the farmer and had lunch at a hotel by the beach.


Time to go home. We decided to marathon-drive all the way back to Edinburgh to save us from having to pay for another hotel night, so we drove in shifts all the way back.

By midnight we were home, safe and sound. All in all, this was an amazing roadtrip and we got to tick another few cool places of our list.

Amazing how far you can get with a GPS, a car game for kids 6 years+ a driver, a co-pilot/navigator and a dinner-lady in the back seat! :)

Tank!

Time for some blogging CPR!

It is amazing how time flies, it really is! Sadly enough, time has flown by so fast so we started neglecting our old blog we used for updates while still in Ireland and in the early days here in Scotland.

For those of you faithful readers that used to follow us back in Ireland, thank you and sorry we stopped writing! For those of you that just found out about this blog and would like to find out more about what we were up to on the Emerald Isle, please click on the link below:

http://shaenas.spaces.live.com/

This new and improved blog will be our second attempt at keeping all of you loved ones updated on our antics here in the land of the kilts and elsewhere. There will be written updates of course accompanied by photos and – wait for it – videos! That’s right; we are now in a possession of a video camera and will use it as often as we can, because it is awesome!

Please check back soon(ish), and there will be more. Promise.

Peter & Shaena