The Lindahl News: Abroad Edition

Our girls learned a new joke concerning Thanksgiving Day here: Q. What do you call Thanksgiving in Sweden? A. Thursday! Our morning was just like a regular Thursday morning here:  Wes worked on classwork and I headed off to my English Conversation group...E and M really wanted to meet my students to chat and Anne came along as well.  Our conversation included "Black Friday" here vs. there. My students were rather amazed with the "Doorbuster Deals" one might get by getting up super early to stand in line for limited offers that appeared too good to be true. It was really fun to have them in class with us! Before class was fun, too, as I let them test out (quietly, of course!) the drum set in my classroom.   Here are the girls with some of my students, three were absent on this day.  I'm so thankful to have met each one of these special young adults! As it's a regular Thursday in Sweden, our gang headed o...

The girls requested that we bake together sometime when they came to Sweden. In preparation, I sewed these two aprons from IKEA dish towels. Armed with a ***secret*** recipe, we made pepparkakor cookies with the plan of sharing them  with others.Using a water bottle for a rolling pin worked just swell.  The cookie cuters were from an IKEA woodsy animal set. These are hedgehogs.  These are squirrels. Here's what the completed, sprinkled batch looks like after their time baking in the oven. The next day we headed off with the cookies to share with the College Line Swedes following the Pippi Longstocking play they performed for our flickas.  This tradition was started for the Lindahl family in 1989 as Elder (Wes's father) had his College Line Swedes present Pippi to our 6 1/2 year old daughter, Anne, when we visited Sweden! In fact, one of the current student's Mom was in that same line in 1989! Here's the cast of the P...

Anne thought that E and M could make the walk from the top of the hill where the SVF campus is located to the shopping area at the bottom of the hill near Lake Vattern. It's well over two miles in all! It was, frankly, a rough start.  It was cold for these flickas. We stopped for a warm-up at Sofia Church - Sofiakyrkan... and here they weren't much impressed by this lovely gem of a church that their grandmother loves. They cheered up marginally when given the opportunity to use my cell phone to take pictures outside. Just a couple of blocks past the Sofia Church is a Red Cross Secondhand shop. I credit this shop for saving our chilly day as Anne found warm snowpants for the girls to wear. From here on out, their sunnier dispositions returned.  A visit to a favorite candy store helped even more! Fortified by a wee bit of sugar, the flickas pressed on. Jul decor is out in full measure in selected stores in Jonkoping! SVF-ers...

Though a couple of weeks after her actual birthday, we knew we had to make a big deal out of having a Swedish celebration to mark the occasion here! Once back in Jonkoping after our time in Stockholm, we headed out in search of the cake.  Wes and I had had a sweet fika at the Bagarn Bakery earlier in November, so our crew headed there for fika (I promised the girls a fika every day they were here) and possibilities of cake selection. Family fika in process There was only one possibility...a pale pink marzipan Princess Cake topped with a delicate flower. Our Birthday Girl said, "Ja!" Every party needs a few decorations. This happened:   Every party needs guests and Anne's former roommate, Elin, came with her adorable youngest son. Because we are in Sweden, this was a morning birthday party fika. You might notice a panda bear theme here - M is crazy for pandas! Once gathered around the table, the cake was presented and the birt...