Snow, garden birds, swans calling in the darkness, the shortness of the day…

It started to snow here where I’m living late in the evening on Saturday, and on Sunday we had many separate snowfalls. It was a surprise, a very pleasant one, because the snow that we had on Independence Day had already melted away earlier. But it wasn’t that cold – around 0 degrees Celsius and -1 degrees Celsius at the lowest. Yesterday, on Monday, we had eight centimetres of snow and it was a bit colder. Today it has been as cold as yesterday and we have pretty heavy snowfall, as promised. 🙂 It has been snowing all day.

The first four pictures I took yesterday.

It's been a cat.

A snow cat it was.

a rose bush in December

One of our rose bushes still had some leaves yesterday. The sun was shining low…

About the length of the day… or about the shortness… Today, here where I’m living, the sun rose at 9.35 AM and the sun sets at 15.14 PM – the length of the day is 5 h 39 min. It starts to get lighter again on Friday next week. 🙂

feeding wild birds

Now we have two feeding spots for wild birds in our garden. This is the new one. We’ve had great tits, blue tits, sparrows, a couple of blackbirds and a great spotted woodpecker.

I’ve heard swans calling many times lately – I’ve been standing in our garden, in the darkness, and I’ve heard the sounds of swans – they’ve been flying somewhere near and some swans have been honking by/on the lake, I think.

glögi time

It’s the glögi season again! My glögi last night in the pic above. I’ve already drunk some litres of it this season. It’s delicious and nicely warming.

What is glögi? – I wrote this a year ago: Glögi is a traditional, hot and spiced drink. It’s mainly a Christmas (and pre-Christmas) drink in Finland. It can be translated as mulled wine. However, not all the glögi drinks are like wine – alcoholic drinks – some are, but, actually, we drink a lot of juice glögi in Finland, so… glögi is… glögi in Finland. As a non-alcoholic drink it’s some fruit or berry juice, hot and spiced. This one that I’m having is grape, blackcurrant and blueberry juice, spiced with cinnamon, bitter orange peel, cloves, cardamom and ginger – all the traditional Christmas or winter spices. Glögi can be bought ready-made – that’s probably why the juice glögi is so popular.

The rest of the pictures I took today.

December

December

Just love, lovely. A wish for Christmas.

December

This is some wintry December now, but we do have these changing weather conditions here in the southern part of Finland, so, let’s just enjoy this, for now, for a while… 🙂

December

At the moment we have almost 20 centimetres of snow on the ground, it definitely is the snow record for this season here where I’m living. And last winter, no, no, we didn’t have this much snow, no… So, “go, go… go outside!”, I must say to myself today. Still more snow coming down all the time now.

-Leena