KSena's Journal

My mother adopted some customs/foods-- She really loved that flat rye bread, the hard stuff that I'd almost call a cracker, but that comes in large round sheets. I don't like rye, so I never got into it, but I remember her bringing home the big round packages wrapped in blue paper.

At Christmas, she would make rice porridge (I do it, too), using the recipe she learned from her Swedish host mother. We used to listen to an album of Swedish winter/Christmas music every Christmas morning. I don't remember the name of the album, but it was vinyl (this was the early 1970s, so I suppose it couldn't very well have been anything else) and had kids sledding on the cover.

At one point, on a trip, my mother found a Swedish bakery a couple of hours away from where we lived. It was too far for her to go often (we didn't even own a car then), but she would buy a lot of bread whenever she did get there. I specifically remember limpa (sp?), but there may have been others, too.

I'm not sure if my mother's birth family didn't have Christmas customs (surely they must have? I can't remember anything in that direction with that part of the family, but...) or if she simply didn't like those customs much.