Decorating My Swedish House for Christmas Simple Life in Northern Sweden

We've known each other quite a while haven't we bud? Yeah. So here is the gingerbread dough. Squirrel! And look there's actually a spruce cone. Yeah me too. And it looks like a spruce tree. Well good morning and welcome to vlogmas day three. So the winds yesterday turned very warm and we've had some rain and the snow is sadly melting. It is very wet. I think it's two celsius at the moment so I'm not sure how much of this snow will remain. What would you like now? Hazelnut? Where should we put you? Here this is quite nice. There you go. Hazelnut for you sir. Is that good? Excellent. You're angry at me hey? It's here. Buddy is the squirrel that tolerates me the most. He always comes right up to me and I do wonder whether he is baby pear because I have known him at least four years. We've known each other quite well haven't we bud? Yeah. Sylvie! Morning! I wondered where you were. You look a little wet. That one is enough thank you. So the female sitting here is a female from this year so she's only a few months old. And buddy no. Buddy get off me. Don't get annoyed at me. You're the taking it too far. You've got nuts there. So the female here she is from this year and this is actually the closest I've ever been to her and just maybe six weeks ago she was absolutely terrified of me. So it's really nice that she's got bold. It is so easy just to stay here all morning and film buddy and everyone else but I think I'm going to go home. I want to make those gingerbread cookies that I made the dough for yesterday. So this morning we've had buddy, sylvie, rusty, junior and we also had the young female who is still above me eating. I wanted to give you guys the honour of naming her. So if you have any name suggestions the name that has the most likes can be the official name. So if you make a comment and the most thumbs up will be the chosen name for the female. Oh this wind. Yeah if you've got a name for her put it in the description and we will hopefully have a name for her by tomorrow or the next day. Okay let's get home and have some coffee. So here is the gingerbread dough. I had it in the fridge overnight and it's pretty firm now and I roll it and then cut out the shapes. I got distracted with a squirrel caching outside. We think it's potentially towards brother because it looks like him. Anyway back to this. I had to warm it up just a tiny bit because it was cracking. First squirrel. Yay it's a squirrel. Like a saw. Yeah maybe we should uh. No no it's fine. Why? Bigger tail? Oh the trees are so cute. Yeah can I put him here? What happened? Oh no. Or you can just. He's no longer a gingerbread. Yeah me too. Well you only have to wait like 15 minutes. Here are our gingerbread biscuits and they need 10 to 12 minutes in the oven. Um I just filmed us trying them and I cut off our heads so they're good. No longer. I didn't use brown sugar or molasses which will definitely make them better and also the other thing is that because I used sourdough they rose like triple what they were supposed to. I'll have a squirrel. Cheers. I made them more crunchy. Oh just cooked it longer. They're nice. I like them. I don't need my coffee. I'll get my coffee for you. Big number 400. 400 something. Oh wow. Yeah. Has she started already? No. This is such a nice way to use sourdough discard and if you don't know what that means, when you're making sourdough bread you constantly need to feed with flour and water and you always need to take your sourdough starter to a minimum amount and so you always have this like leftover discard. So instead of putting it in the compost I made these. Definitely room for improvement. So I'm on a little foraging mission for these. This is a spruce cone and I'm actually going to use these for crafts. So this here is a spruce tree in our garden and Tord actually had a dray in this tree. Unfortunately the branch where his dray was snapped so I never saw where his dray went. He's clearly fine because it happened many months ago but this is the branch of a spruce tree and look there's actually a spruce cone and as you can see it's all closed so this still has the seeds inside. I love filming at this time of day because you can see outside it's like dusk because if I film in the middle of the day outside is just white because of the snow. So continuing on with making the kitchen more festive I bought this in the second-hand store for 59 which is like five pounds or six dollars and it looks like a spruce tree and that's the main reason I bought it because most Christmas trees look like pine trees. So as I was saying outside this is a pine cone and this is a spruce cone so much different in size and shape and you can see they're both open so they've lost their seeds and so my plan is to remove this plant which is just growing a bit crazy so I'm going to move the plant upstairs and this will be there in the middle with little snowy spruce cones. Super cute. It's time for you to go upstairs okay here we go This bit got burned so all of this will die. No way. Where was it? On the radiator. I'm thinking maybe if I snip it and put it in water. Yeah yeah. Ah it just happened now. It was like the past few days I was just thinking of putting it like this is that it won't reach. Um here? yay I'm so happy with how it looks Wow. You like it? Yes it's really nice. You making lunch? Yeah I can smell. How's it going with the calendars? Good but uh the EU address at the bottom. Yeah. I tried to make it simpler. Yeah. So how many orders is Lucy doing? She has done like 150 I think. Really? Yeah. She's already Yeah we're on 100. Maybe a bit more than 100. Oh wow. We're on 100. Um so if you're waiting for a calendar. True. They're literally being packed right now. True. And she doesn't have sacks. We need to tell her to go to the post office. I'm doing tempeh. So what I was going to say earlier is that I haven't uh got time today to make the little pine cones look snowy like this. I might do it in a couple of days maybe. Yeah. It's funny how like this is like normal food for us. Would you say? I mean we eat this pretty regularly. Yeah. But this makes it feel so like special. It is special. It's Christmas. You can get some? I have just finished the edit for this video. I wanted to sign off and it is past midnight. I started editing way too late and it was also a big video. If it looks like there's a fire I've got a fireplace on the tv just to add some ambience. Today I had multiple comments on Facebook and Instagram of people saying that some of my squirrel videos were AI. And at first AI was fun and you know even Juan and I tried making squirrels enjoy a picnic pool. Whatever. But now AI has led us to question our reality and I've seen on social media AI is now causing people to crave authenticity and realism and real people and real stories. It does worry me that AI is warping our perception of nature and I see so many photos and videos of AI birds and just sharing false information about wildlife which is so harmful. So I wanted to confirm and say that I don't use AI for any of my squirrel photos or videos or any videos or photos. Everything is real. I am real. Which is a strange thing to say nowadays. Anyway maybe I'm rambling because it is past my bedtime. It's 12 30. I'm probably going to go to bed after one because I need to edit this. But thank you so much for your support and the lovely comments on the videos. Anyway good night and see you tomorrow morning. Bye. Hi Dani. This is Cresta Schieffer in the western United States. A favorite Christmas memory of mine is the Saturday after Thanksgiving driving into the mountains with my family to chop down a Christmas tree in the forest. We met there with other family members and built a bonfire. We brought along hot chocolate and goodies and each family ventured into the forest to find their own perfect tree. We don't have any squirrels but we do have a few chickadees this year. And driving home through the dirt road it was fun to visit with my family and recollect favorite memories of past Christmases. Merry Christmas to you all. Thank you Dani. Blessings.