Christmal culmination

Today is the most important day of Christmas, you others just don't understand it. Today is when you eat all that food you have been preparing for weeks, meet your family, and open all the gifts. Is it maybe a matter of being a christian protestant that does it? Or why are the Swedes doing everything on the 24th, and have an expression* "worse than Christmas Day" to show that nothing really is worse than the Christmas Day. I would not claim that I am a christian protestant myself, having left the state church over 12 years ago (and now also the church itself has left the state). But I guess when I was born, and the most frequent thing to "be" in Sweden, is a christian protestant. But I don't know, do all protestants celebrate today?

Yesterday I ran for 50 minutes (8 km) to try to balance out the excessive intake of food that is unavoidable today. I might already have balanced it out yesterday, having eaten Toffifee and belgian Seefruits (Guylian). I just recently woke up and had a normal muesli breakfast, but soon it will all start. At lunchtime there will be herring in various sauces, bread, egg, eel, cabbage etc. Then we'll try to digest that, and watch Donald Duck and his friends celebrate Christmas (exactly the same episodes we watch each year on state TV, it's tradition, then you can get away with anything), and of course eat chocolates. Then when that is finished, we will start eating from the "Christmas Table"; ham, more cabbage, more herring, more bread, more eggs, mini-sausages, meat balls, potato gratin with sundried tomato (vegetarian anchovy =)), etc. etc. My sister eats no meat, and I eat very little, so we often exchange items from the otherwise "meat"-holiday and make it vegetarian, and/or add other vegetarian dishes. And of course, all food is accompanied with beer, wine, schnaps and/or ciders. We're swedes, what can I say?

After that we'll try to digest what is left of the lunch and Donald Duck-chocolates, and now also the Christmas Table-addition, and get ready to hand out the gifts from under the Christmas tree and open them. When that is finished, we'll have Santa-porridge to really top our stomaches up. In one of the porridge bowls there is a whole almond, and the one who gets it will win the 'almond gift', this year it is a box of Ferrero Rocher-chocolates. Whoever wins that will do smart in wating to eat that box of chocolate until next year. But how can you wait when it comes to chocolate


*very local.