So in Sweden, you celebrate Christmas on Christmas Eve, the 24^th of December. The day starts with getting pimped out; this normally involves curling irons and pretty clothes. Then, there is Christmas lunch at 13.00. Lunch is eggs and pickled herring, with something called Janson’s Temptation. It is a kind of gratin made with potatoes, onions, anchovies and cream. Delish. Then there is a break for Walt Disney’s Christmas which all of Sweden’s population of 9 million watches religiously at 15.00. When it gets dark, around four or five pm, it is present time, after which we have our MEAT. The meat course consists of ham with mustard, sausages, meatballs, ribs and more of the left over fishy stuff. Then there is a rice pudding desert, chocolate pralines and fish again in the middle of the night. At Christmas, all Swedes are stuffed like sausages by Christmas morning and we eat left-over’s for the rest of the week. I feel faint even typing about it.

I love Christmas food. And as a kid, I loved it so much that I did not realize that you were only supposed to take a little of each thing so for each helping, I helped myself to a hell of a lot too much. Anyway, for a couple of years in a row (when I was around ten years old I think) I stuffed myself so full of food that I was in absolute blistering agony. My parents thought it was appendicitis and took me to the hospital pronto only to find out that it was simple indigestion. After the second or third time of this, my parents got savvy and put restrictions on my plating.

The moral of the story: check your kids plate when they come back from the buffet table.