hiidenkonttibeta

This is the last day of the year. And I’ve just learned to write the date correctly. Oh well.

The city of Oulu, apparently like most cities in Finland, won’t arrange fireworks this New Year because of the Asian つなみ disaster. But individual people have been firing up fireworks all evening – it’s legal from 18:00 onwards, but they started at 17:15 or so. On the apartment building on the other side of the yard someone was firing them from a balcony. Very smart..

We’re not celebrating very hard. I’m listening to This Mortal Coil (not your average party music), burning “dragon” incense and updating my blog, and that certain pretty girl decided to wash the dishes at this hour, mostly to cheer up her depressed friend.

This is also the last entry of the year. See you next year!

Visited the forest again today. I shot about 70 photos with camera phone (and some on BW film), almost all of them stereo photo pairs. I’ll post a collection of them if there’s any good ones. Had to leave when my shoes and pant legs were full of snow – it was over my knee in some places. I’d have used snowshoes if I had known how deep it actually was.

Rest of the time (while not eating) I’ve been playing Zelda: the Oracle of Seasons on the GBC.

On this jouluaatto Mother Earth slept under a pretty covering of snow:

It was quiet and peaceful in the forest, as if all the animals and birds were sleeping, too. The only movement was the snow falling, and it isn’t a noisy process. Too bad there’s a lot of clouds. It’s almost full moon, and the snowy forest would look even more magical in moonlight.

Joulu is traditionally the time when one eats well. I’m going to Tervola to enjoy my mom’s cookings. But the day didn’t start so well in the eating department. I hadn’t bothered to shop any food (since I’m going away for the weekend), so my breakfast consisted of a cup of coffee, a can of soured milk (with best-before date 2 days ago) and a banana which was quite soft and looked like this:

Hopefully it gets better towards the evening.. I’ll also try updating まんぴつ via mobile phone.

It’s Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year. In Oulu, the length of this day is 3 hours 35 minutes – the Sun rises at 10:28 and sets at 14:03. The Earth starts getting closer to Sun and days start getting longer. But the real winter is only starting now in here. January and February are our coldest months – but cold weather also means more white snow and lack of clouds, so we’ll get a lot more light during our days than we had during our long dark snowless Autumn.

Winter Solstice is, of course, the original reason for celebrations at this time of the year. Various cultures had religious festivals around the time of the Solstice. The Germanic people had Yule, which the Swedish-speaking Scandinavians call Jul and we Finns call Joulu. The Romans had Saturnalia and they celebrated Mitra, the God of the Sun. Winter Solstice is Mitra’s birthday – and in Julian calendar Winter Solstice is on 25th of December.

There are those who still celebrate the rebirth of the Sun, with something like this piece (from some random web page):

Sytytän taskukokoisen auringon ja toivotan hyvää talvipäivänseisausta.

It’s 06:00 on Sunday morning. We wake up on the sound of hammering. Some (upstairs? next-door? downstairs?) neighbour is handling wooden boards and hammering nails in them. Probably building christmas presents for all the people he knows, bird boxes is my guess. Luckily they’re pre-cut boards, so there’s no sound of saw, too. Meitä on moneen junaan…