Yuletide red.
Text and Photo © JE Nilsson and CM Cordeiro 2012

Every year this time of the season, yuletide invites pour in to spend time with family and friends, so there’s every opportunity abound to get dressed in something warm, go Christmas marketing all over the city and then to dinner.

Most years at the Christmas markets, you’ll meet familiar faces, who delight in showing you their handmade wares and new decorations in festive red, tinsel silver and gold.

This year, a note of more candles than electric lamps lighting up the interiors of the market places, all creating a warm feeling that contrasts so nicely against the frosty Nordic nights. Outside on a clear moonlit market evening, the stars stand crisp against a black velvet cloak of night, dim voices that float through the air and what you hear most is the soft crunch of snow under leather soles.

Paper tinsel, stars and hearts.

At play.

Inside the chocolate factory.

Candlelit candies.

Gingerhouse warm.

In the corner.

Christmas hearts, wrapped.

I’ve found even the smallest details, of tinsel wrapped chocolate in the shape of hearts for example, of moss in a basket of gingerbreads or oranges decorated with cloves tied with red silk ribbon hung at stalls, all help create that feeling of a Scandinavian Christmas as near as one could get to the North Pole. Where in an instant of make-belief, it would be here that Santa’s sleigh whizzing past overhead pulled by a set of reindeer with bells ringing is perfectly expected, and where the child in you occasionally almost expects it to be that very sleigh overhead at the slightest jingle of just about any bell of which the Christmas markets abound.

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