Another Christmas come and gone!

Well first and foremost, I hope you had a lovely holiday.  Whether you live in Finland or not, I hope you had a safe and warm holiday with close friends and family.

Every time Christmas comes around, I get a bit home sick...but this year I made up for it!  I had a birthday party for my son in November (I was very sad that family couldn't be here to celebrate my son's first birthday) and many great friends attended!  I hosted a cookie exchange and ended up having a lovely evening with some close friends, and then I hosted a dinner party for my knitting group I am a part of - again, a lovely time!
Also in the works, is having a dear friend (from a knitting group) come over for Christmas supper on Boxing Day.  Why wait??  Well, if you're not on my Facebook, I'll explain!

Christmas Eve is "the day" to open gifts in the evening, have a visit from Santa (usually a neighbour or a rental Santa), have the huge meal with family and Christmas Day is the day for Mass and visiting other family and friends.
By 12pm on Christmas Eve, everything is closed.  By 2pm, the buses do not run at all, nor do they run on Christmas Day!  In Halifax, the buses have a set schedule for Sundays and holidays (including Christmas), so the buses will be running as per normal.  I'm sure it's a volunteer basis for the drivers.
So the dilemma was that my friend Susanne, could not join us for Christmas dinner on Christmas Eve, because she wouldn't have a way back home and crashing at our place wasn't an option, because she has two dogs of her own that need walking.  So!  Boxing Day I will be very excited to prepare a large meal of stuffed roast pork fillet, mashed potatoes, roasted veggies and home made apple crisp!

Some traditional Finnish foods for Christmas include:

• Carrot, root or liver casserole - sold in a tin foil rectangle-shaped pan.  I have not had the liver one but the other ones are fabulous!
• Rossolin salad - a friend made some for me!  It contains chopped beets, carrots, onions (raw), apples and pickles.  A lovely side dish...I've already eaten a third of it but am saving it for Christmas dinner with Susanne.
• Ham - the hams here are quite huge, which I find hilarious because the ovens are quite small!
• Christmas Tart - it's in a shape of a star and has plum jam in the center and sometimes dusted with icing sugar.

I'll be visiting some more friends after Christmas and I'll take photos of their food!

Holiday Cheers to you and yours,

Dominique

Temperatures are wild

The big thing to do when living in Finland is to wear layers.  Think of Shrek and his ogres are like onions and have lots of layers theory.

Typical person living in Finland would wear this on a cold winter day (today is -29*C with wind chill and last night was -34*C with wind chill!):

Long underwear (along with regular underwear and bra if applicable), t-shirt, sweater, pants, snow pants, jacket, neck warmer (sometimes known as a collar here), hat, two layers of mittens, two layers of socks (one pair being knitted wool socks), winter boots, sometimes a scarf and a hood of their jacket.

I strongly recommend bringing with you good moisturizer - they have some pretty good stuff here, but Aveeno is my personal favourite and it is not sold here.  Also ensure that you have LOTS of lip balm or chap sticks!
Because the air is quite dry here, I've been licking my lips like crazy.
Lip licking + cold dry air =very painful lips!  I have found that I was very keen on putting lip balm on during the other seasons too!  (Yes they sell Blistex and some Lip Smacker flavours here).
For you mothers out there, nipple cream (lanolin) is an awesome moisturizer and can be worn by those allergic to wool because it is hypoallergenic.

For awhile it was about -20*C and the lakes were frozen over and that was all fine.  But then it warmed up briefly to -13*C for a few days...the lakes were still frozen solid!  But suddenly it just plummeted to -25 to -35 out of nowhere!

The Finns are reporting that last summer was the hottest it's ever been with the temperature once reaching 37.2*C!  An all time record in several decades....and we got to experience it!  Tim was in Greece at the time and it was only 34*C there.  HMMPH.
Since fall, the Finns have been reporting that this winter may be the coldest of winters ever....lovely.

Incredibly cold weather in some parts of Canada can mean power outages if the electrical lines break.  However, that does not seem to be the case here.  I may have mentioned this ages ago in earlier postings, but the electrical lines are under ground...Yes water pipes can burst due to the coldness, it happened to a friend nearby recently.  But in general, one can survive in Finland.

And yes, we have lots of snow but so far not too much ice!  I hate ice...it's so dangerous for everybody!
So another white Christmas it is!  The snow falls here like flurries in Nova Scotia.  That is typically their equivalent of a snow storm.  So you can still walk in it and not feel like you're getting "nowhere" thanks to white-out conditions.  Because as far as I know, they don't really have "white-out conditions".  Perhaps it is different for a driver of a vehicle.

Happy Holidays everybody, don't drink and drive and best of everything in the New Year!

A Christmas Treat

Typically around the holiday season there is a Christmas Tart that is star shaped with a dallop of plum jam in the center.  Those are really great and supposedly very easy to make, but I have yet to try.

As well, another popular treat (besides chocolate of course!) are ginger bread cookies.  Big deal right?  Well, for my knitting group the other night, I hosted a Christmas roast chicken dinner.  A guest brought a box of ginger bread cookies and a package of blue cheese.

You can scrape your jaw off the floor now, it's really not that bad of a combination!  It's like chocolate covered potato chips (you can buy these in PEI)!  The combination of sweet and salty was nice.

While visiting another friend for dinner over there, they had the same thing set out for dessert (along with chocolates and fresh fruits) but they also found a goat cheese made with cranberries mixed in.  Well, I typically hate cranberries but this was really lovely with the goat cheese and then spread onto a gingerbread cookie!

It's been over a year...

So now what shall I do to update this blog more?

I'll still post the little bits and pieces I learn about...but I was thinking of giving reviews of places (mostly restaurants and areas in Jyv�skyl�)....so keep an eye out!

A Newfie Joke for my Finnish friends...

Newfies are people from Newfoundland, Canada.  There are many hundreds of jokes about them, just like blonde jokes or insert another culture here jokes.
Please do not take offense if you are a Newf.  I DO have multiple friends that are from Newfoundland....

Anyhow, the purpose of me posting this in here, is to somewhat explain how Newfies speak.  They sort of have their own way of saying things (often known as Newfinese) and I cannot describe it to my Finnish friends, as I haven't been around a Newf in ages!
So here's a cute little joke I got in an e-mail a couple days ago...and hopefully this explains Newfinese to my Finnish friends.
The accent is something else...that I could never mimic!
Oh and my husband is part Newfie...somewhere in the history...last name Riggs is a very Newfie last name, as far as I know...and he went drinking with some Finns last year for Vappu and he said "It might be possible that a Finn can out-drink a Newfie!"

Lubricant
Murphy's' old lady  had been  pregnant for some time and now  the time had come. 

He brought her to the   doctor and the doctor began to deliver the  baby.

She had a little boy, and the  doctor looked over at Murphy and said. 'Hey,   Murph! You just had you a  son,!

'Ain't dat grand, !!' Murphy got  excited by this, but just then the doctor   spoke up and said, 'Hold on! We ain't   finished  yet, !'

The doctor  then delivered a little girl. 

He said,  'Hey, Murph! You got you a  daughter, !!!!  She is a pretty lil ting, too....'

Murphy  got kind of puzzled by this and then the doctor  said, 'Hold on, we  aint got done yet,  !'

The doctor then delivered another boy  and said,  Murph, you just had   yourself another boy, !'

Murphy  said to the doctor, 'Doc, what caused all of dem   babies,?' 

The doctor said, 'You  never know Murph, it was probably something that  happened during  conception.'  

Murphy said, 'Ah yeah, during  conception.'

When Murph and his wife went  home with their three  children, he sat  down with his wife and said, 

'Mama, you  remember dat night  that we ran out of  Vaseline and we had to use dat dere 3-in-1  Oil.'


She said, 'Yeah, I   remember dat night...'

Murph said,  'I'll tell you, ......it's a  f*c kin' good ting we didn't  use WD-40."