Christmas Past

The Twelve Days of Christmas are over. Most of us probably have our trees down (except me…), but let's get in our Christmas time machine. All of Iceland goes all out with their Christmas decorations, but not in a tacky, over-the-top way. More like in a sparkly-magical-wonderland kind of way. There were live trees on the sidewalks of Reykjavik, whimsically decorated the shop windows, and a postbox to send a letter to "the Icelandic Santa." And I do believe I discovered where Anthropologie gets some of its ideas!

(I do apologize that some of these photos are blurry. The limited and dim daylight was a pain in the hiney sometimes!)

The Christmas Goat outside IKEA. It is held down with construction equipment, and managed to escape fire this year!

Milk, Christmas Milk to be specific. Do you know what makes it different from regular milk? Not a thing. But there are Christmas Lads on each carton, which surely must make it taste more festive!

I loved this window. Little shreds of gold leaf suspended on monofilament strung from the top of the window to the bottom.

I hate that this picture turned out blurry. The fairy lights in the branches and the trees were so, so pretty. Let's just pretend I was going for a bokeh effect. Yeah, that's the ticket!

The day that the Christmas tree was supposed to be lit, a huge wind storm came through. It was the most incredible wind I have ever been in. So it canceled the tree lighting — and it took broke the tree (a gift from Norway, as it has been for the past 50 years) in half. (There are not many trees in Iceland, let alone enough to supply a giant national tree every year.) After breakfast we saw the crane taking it down.

So the next day, the mayor of Reykjavik cut down a tree somewhere, and we had to watch the tree lighting on the Internet from home.

I hope a look back at these vignettes of Reykjavik at Christmastime have made your day a little more sparkly! I guess I can take the tree down now.

Winding Down

Well, my darlings, 'tis the season — the season for getting caught up in doing other things and neglecting your blog followers. I am so sorry! You know how it is. There's school and work and laundry and vacuuming and preparing for Christmas. Corbin had an orchestra concert Monday night (he plays violin, for those who don't know). Now that he's in high school we have to make sure the whole tuxedo is ready, shoes clean, then scarf down dinner and run out to the school.

We aren't the type that make a zillion Christmas cookies and decorate every room in the house. We also only have a few people to buy gifts for so it hasn't been too ridiculous, but we missed Thanksgiving and by the time we got back, Christmas preparation was underway. I'm going to do a separate post on our Christmas decorations because we bought a few things while in Iceland and we have adopted the tradition of having loads of candles (even more than we usually have).

So, by this point in our trip, we were on our last few days. We left a some days with nothing pressing to do, which ended up being a good thing. After such a mild November, on Sunday, November 30, Iceland was hit by the first of a series of big storms (which are still ongoing!). We took the time to drive around a bit, look at houses, and we had to go see the Christmas goat outside Ikea. The 6-meter-tall goat has been placed in front of their Ikea since 1966, but it has not always stood long enough to see Christmas due to, umm, fire and, not surprisingly, wind. So we figured we had better get a photo while it was still there!

Here is something that you can file under "only in Iceland": As we were driving out of the city, I got a text from Snorri, the manager at our hotel. 

"Looks like you're not staying in. You just passed us on the road out of town. Enjoy."

I figured it was our gigantic Yukon XL that gave us way.

"Mostly the careful driving of Papa Fierce. A local in that car would go 120/hour and never indicate."

Things like this made me deliriously happy that we were being looked out for. I love that about these people. Love them, love them, love them.

We drove out to Kjalarnes. We had seen photos of this pretty little church and wanted to see it in person. It is very close to the water, as you can see, and by this point, the wind was incredible. Close to 50+ mph and spitting rain. So we took these shots from inside the car!

Because of the crazy weather and the prediction that it would get worse, we went to the grocery store so we wouldn't have to venture out for dinner. Plus we were out of Appelsín. And Malt og Appelsín. And we needed more skyr (pear was my favorite) and licorice and chocolate.

So Kevin made us omelets and we sat in our living room and listened to the wind howl around us. 

Because our room was exposed on three sides, we really were in the midst of it. The pictures below are taken from each of our decks.

On Monday morning we found out that the wind had taken down the national Christmas tree, a gift from Norway for the past 50 years. There is now an Icelandic Christmas tree standing in Austurvöllur Square for the first time in half a century. Here they are taking the poor, broken Norwegian down.

 

We spent the rest of Monday just taking one last walk around town and taking pictures of things we wanted to remember.

 We met up with some friends again, this time at Stofan. We could have stayed there all day, it was so cozy and the company was wonderful.

But we had to leave and meet Rakel from the Hotel Borg. She had offered to have us stay at the Hotel Borg for this last part of our trip, but we ended up staying at the Kvosin Hotel since we changed plans and came back to Reykjavik a night early. Rakel had prepared a very nice bag of gifts for our family, including a little box with a piece of Eyjafjallajökull in it! 

 Even though we didn't stay at the Hotel Borg, which is absolutely gorgeous, they very kindly bought us dinner that night at Nora Magasin, which is right next door. You'll remember that this was where we had our first dinner on our very first night in Iceland. They had decorated for Christmas while we were away.

Well, maybe part of my delay in keeping this blog updated is that we are nearly at the end of our trip here. If I'm done posting and reliving the trip, then I have to face that the trip really is over. Sigh.

Up next: Our last day in Iceland and our visit to the Blue Lagoon.