Mood: Chrismassy

First a word of warning. This post will be pretty Xmassy. I know it's only mid-November and the big winter feast is still more than a month away. I'm also sure that by the time the holiday season is finally upon us, many people will already have had an overdose of Christmas. So if you'd rather keep your Xmas/Noël/jul/joulu exposure to a minimum, be warned, I'm already in mood for Christmas!

I suppose I am what you would call a Christmas person. I love singing carols and baking ginger bread (or piparkakkuja, as we say in Finnish). When the days start getting shorter and evenings darker, I seize the moment and burn loads of candles even before it's time to put the Christmas lights and decorations on. My first year in France, I even bought a Christmas tree several weeks before the actual day, just because I could (yes, here people start selling Xmas trees already at the end of November - a bit weird for a Finn who's used to getting her tree just a couple of days before Christmas)! 

It's no wonder then that I've already started planning my Christmas holidays. I've booked my plane tickets and the train tickets and started drafting my travel itinerary through Finland. For as much as I like France, I can't really imagine spending Chrismas anywhere else than Lapland. I suppose one could describe it as a some kind of innate need to be surrounded by snow and -25 degrees of Celcius at least once a year and preferably around the midwinter feast - a couple of weeks will do though, no need for months of extreme cold. 

But carols and ginger bread aside, I have another tradition I like to hold on to: a Chrismas ballet. Last year for I managed to get a last-minute ticket to the otherwise fully-booked Finnish Opera's (magnificent!) representation of The Snow Queen - in case you're tempted, it's still on the program until the end of this month and it's absolutely worth seeing. 

In December, the Finnish national ballet is redoing a Christmas classic, The Nutcracker and the Mouse King - always a good choice. However, if the Wannabe Ballerinas, a Helsinki-based group of adult ballet dancers who do classical dance with a bit of twist, are also redoing their end-of-the-year show, I just might opt for two Chrismas ballets this year!