Challenge Day 3

Perfect month of May
Cool mornings at the playground
Summer is too hot

(It was meant to be about something I hate. But I couldn't be bothered to do a haiku for something I don't like!)

All the rest have 31...

Anyone else here a big fan of December?

Now chances are you are either cheering or staring at the screen in frank incredulity. December! Christmas! Preparing for Christmas! Woohoo! Or alternatively: December? Time of frantic Christmas shopping and big Christmas and New Year get-togethers where someone is sure to end up in St Mungo's with a satsuma or walnut up his or her nose? Stress on earth and ill will to all men!

Be that as it may, I love it.
I love the fairy lights on the houses. They make up for the dark mornings and evenings. People here don't go in for the different colours so much, just the starry white ones. Beautiful.
I love the anticipation of the first snowfall on our balcony, as we watch the snowline moving further and further down our mountain.
I love preparing for Christmas. I even love planning how we're going to prepare for Christmas (which admittedly happens in November but never mind).
I love doing Bible readings and lighting candles and having special baking or craft activities with the children all through Advent. Some that we loved last year, and some new ones. If you read on here regularly, you already knew that, because I've posted photos and links for the last two winters.

I love December food. When I was little we always had hot-chocolate-with-candy-canes as one of our special Advent treats. Now one day we have hot chocolate with marshmallows with our little ones, and another day mincepies because they're hard to come by here, and another day a cream tea with strawberry jam and freshly baked scones. I know that's traditionally summer fare in the UK, but December is perfect for baking in a way that summer really isn't here. And of course I love cranberry sauce, stuffing, Christmas cake and Christmas pudding too.

I also love that every year our month-long schedule looks a little different - one bonus of being an expat and the daughter of expats is that we have to travel to two different countries to visit both sets of parents. Which means we can't possibly be expected to do that every year. Which means we can be on a three-year rota - one year here, one in the UK, one in Belgium - and no one will think to complain. (Actually, probably neither his parents nor mine would complain anyway. We're very blessed in that respect). I love that we get to fully take part in three different sets of family traditions because of only being with one (extended) family for the whole Christmas week.

And I love that as a result there's very little, if any, arguing or insertion of satsumas into noses, because we want to make the most of seeing each other while we can. Which in turn means I can look forward to the family reunion without apprehension, and enjoy the whole month of December.

I also like May. But that's another story.

Blog challenge

As I haven't posted for so long, I'm doing a blog challenge organised by my friend L to get me back in the habit of posting. There are prompts and everything.

Today's prompt: Write about a discontinued product that you wish you could still buy.

I can't think of any product I like that has been discontinued (does this mean I'm young? I think so, but my children disagree!) so I'm going to write about something I love but can't get over here.

Sausages.

Yep, I said sausages. But you're in Switzerland, you say, do they not eat sausages there? Could it be that they only like cow-based products, you wonder to yourself. Certainly "Heidi" doesn't really feature pigs.

Let me reassure you that they do have pigs here. And they have many many varieties of something they call sausage (well, saucisse, or Wurst, or whatever the Italian for sausage is). They even have beef sausages. What they don't have is British or Irish sausages. And by that, I mean Walls or Richmonds, the best sausages in the world.

Swiss sausages (and German ones, which are also widely available here), are made of meat, and spices. They can best be described as meaty and, sometimes, as extremely salty. British/Irish sausages on the other hand are made of small amounts of pig meat, and large amounts of spices and bread. They are not meaty, nor inordinately salty. They are delicious, and they are not sold here at all. Not even by the shops who specially import British stuff such as Marmite, Cheddar, or Cadburys. (You may not have thought those things were British, but believe me, they are. Root beer, however, is American.)

So whenever we go back to the UK we make sure my mother-in-law has an ample supply of sausages. And we eat sausages in restaurants, given the option. On occasion we have been known to import a packet of frozen ones with us, in our luggage. (Until we discovered that was illegal. Oops.)

But otherwise we must do without. It is the price we pay for living in this beautiful, frustrating country. And now I hear the sounds of dinner being prepared which creates a suitable if somewhat abrupt end to my post.

Postscript: It turns out we're having sausages. The Swiss kind.