Wednesday, December 20, 2006

Swedish Glögg Parties

This past weekend I attended a couple of friends' houses on so-called Glögg parties (glögg is a Swedish type of hot drink, similar to to the Austrian Glüwein for those of you who have tasted this). This is a nice tradition leading up to Christmas to instill some holiday spirit in people's stressed lives.


At the first party hosted by Tomas Chicote & his lovely family in Vasastan in Stockholm, I met many of my old university friends. When I arrived - fashionably late as usual - there was a buzz of activity in all rooms of the apartment: 2 to 37-year olds creating own Christmas decorations in various shapes and forms, 10 or so children playing drums on kitchen-ware and yelling at the top of their lungs in one of the rooms, others helping themselves to hotdogs (all kids' favorite!), Lucia buns and ginger-snap cookies in the kitchen or generally mingling about.


Tomas, his sambo Åsa, their children Stella and Svante, and I formed an improvized Lucia procession (for more info on this strange tradition, read for example here or here) and sang some songs to the other guests. After this, Tomas played the accordion and everyone participated in a ring dance around the apartment, hopping like frogs, pretending to play the fiddle, bass or flute etc...


Quite exhausted after all this playful activity, I continued to the next Glögg party at my long-lasting and best friend Malin's place. Since it was already evening, all the guests with small children had left and my god-daughter Lovisa had already fallen asleep (the photo below is from her christening in October). A few glasses of Glögg and wine later I ended up dancing salsa at Mumbaila on Sveavägen between 1 and 3am. The atmosphere was nice, people happy and DJ Nino played good music.

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