Preparing for Christmas in Northern Sweden

Oh, I really enjoy this. Yeah, you do. I need to get a pair of proper ice skates. I only have an old one from the 90s or something. I guess mine is from the same period, but yours is not so good. The only problem is that we only get to do this... Once a year? Yeah, a couple of times a year in the beginning of winter. And then the snow comes. And no one here is interested enough to clear the ice. No. No one of those with tractors and stuff like that. Of course, there is some indoor skating rinks, but those are pretty far from here. Now we're going home. Eva is going to sleep a little while. Again. Soon we can get you a hockey stick and blades as well. When you're making a wreath, you need a frame or a body. You can either buy one from a hobby store, or you can make one yourself. We have made a simple tool here to make your own wreaths. It's just two planks and some nails. Here you can either make this one, a smaller one, or you can make a big one. The wreath we have on our door is made of straw. That's a really thick one, and I made it with this one. To use the tool is really simple. You just need branches. This is birch and sallow. It's much easier to do it in spring, because they are much softer and more flexible. Now I think it's risky that they will break, but you can do it anyways. Or straw. It's easy also. It's just doing it like this, bending it around. Yes, it broke. The thinner they are, the better. But you need more, of course. I broke it, because it's thick and it's winter, so it isn't as flexible. My recommendation is to do it in spring, but you can pre-soften them a bit. The idea is to put it like this, and try to fasten them around themselves a bit. Use as many as you think, until you get a good body for it. Then you can use metal wire to keep it round. There will be small branches sticking out everywhere when you're done. So you have to trim it with a tool like this. Or just fasten them with metal thread. Now we need to get some more branches to make our wreath. I like to use spruce. I think it's beautiful. I'm not sure how it is in other countries, but in Sweden you need to have your own trees, or you need permission to take branches. This is my own tree. You can also use pine for your wreath, and that is also very lovely. I'm not going to do that today, but I like to use that too. It's easier to get a nicer, thicker texture with spruce. You need to work a little bit more with pine, but in the end it's beautiful. You can also just take some pine branches and stick in and use as kind of decoration in the spruce wreath. So maybe I will do that. Juniper is also very beautiful to have in a wreath, but you have to check where you live because it can be on some endangered list or something. It's beautiful, but the needles are very sharp to work with. And you need a lot of these. So this body you have made, you can reuse year after year. I think I have used this like five or six years now, so it's really good. And then I use green metal wire to fasten the branches so it doesn't show that much. And this is also something I reuse. And then I just fasten the green one in the body here. Just like that. And then we can start. Collect the branches you want. So now I have a bundle of three small branches. Put it on the frame where I knotted the thread. And just take it over and take it twice. One, two. And you take your next bundle. And then you see the thread here? You have to cover that. So you put the new bundle on top of that so it got covered. And then you do the next two. One, two. And you can see that the different spruce trees have different textures. Or different looks. So you can mix if you want to. And you can fill the bundle out with having the more good looking branches at the front. And then you can put another one underneath that doesn't look that good. And then you see the thread? And you cover it. So you see here is my first bundle. And every bundle I use I put a little bit further on. And that's how we build the wreath. You can also see on the spruce branches they are thicker with the needles on top. And under they have like a belly. Naked belly. So you need to put them where it's thickest. Or else it can be... yeah. I guess it could work too but it's more nice with the thicker needles on top. Here towards the end you just need to make sure the new bundles gets under the first one. And make sure the thread is covered by the first bundle we made. Then you have to fasten the green thread. And that I'm doing just by taking the last here and just have it under. And pull. Something like that. Then if it feels like it's missing some branches you can just add afterwards. If it feels like you need to add some. Here you can see you have some ends from the bundle laying under here. So you can trim it because they are like behind. If you're bothered by them. If you think that some of the branches are sticking out too far. I usually trim them a little bit maybe. But I also like the more bushy wild looking wreaths. So I let them off and be. Where I fasten the green thread I make some kind of loop with the rest of the thread that is left. So I have something to hang it on the wall with. So just, I don't know, make a knot or something. Something like that. And usually I let this, if it doesn't show, I let this keep on hanging here on the back side. So I have something to put the thread back on when the wreath is going down. Now you can decorate your wreath if you want to. You can use feathers from chickens or you can make those small yarn birds. You can also collect pine cones or spruce cones like I have here. Then you can just take the thread and put it under the shells here. And hang it and then use the thread to fasten it on the back side. You can use moss or legion or you can use colorful ribbons. There is no limitations. But I like it kind of minimalistic, foresty. So we borrowed a kitchen up in the village to make our sausages. It's nice to have a big table and a bigger space. We made four kinds of sausages. One salami and one what is called fresh sausage. That is, we freeze it fresh so you fry it when you are going to eat it. And then we made a Hungarian style paprika sausage that needs to be smoked. I just googled Hungarian sausage recipe. And found something and tried it. It was lots of paprika in it. And then we made something called prinskorv. I have no idea if this is something in other parts of the world than Sweden. But they are small sausages with a certain kind of spice blend, I guess. And the Hungarian and the prinskorv is going to be smoked. And since we don't have a smoker yet and one of our neighbors just got one. I'm at the place now where all our pigs have come from. So the father is making noises here. A very big pig. So now I'm going to hang up the sausages in the smoker and light it up. Ivar slept badly this night and he hasn't slept at all today. Almost nothing. It was really nice to get some sausage made. It's sad when we ate the last sausage from the last batch. Was it good with sausage? The smoking went really well as well. The design on the smoker is not so good. But the sausage just turned out well. Staring into nothingness. I said that. It was nice. You were sad when they... It was a weird design. The opening where you hanged in the sausage were too small. So it was hard to get the long strands of sausages into the smoker. Me and my father-in-law has plans for building a smoker that we hope will turn out really good for smoking sausage like this. It has been in the making for a couple of years. At least... This summer! At least he has made the foundation. We're going to try to make it so that you can cold smoke in it as well. We want to say thank you to all our Patreons who make these videos possible. Thank you so much. Thank you. You're like our producers. Without you these videos would not be possible. So I guess this is it for this video. Thank you for watching and we'll see you in the next episode. Are you going to eat the milk now? Have you started school yet? No, it's only quarter to ten.