🎄 The 11th Day of December is here! 🎄

Two weeks until Christmas, can you believe it? If you haven’t started preparing for the holidays, now is a good time to start. Our office is already prepared for the festive season as you can see from the pictures.

Today the Frozenbyte employees will share their Christmas plans with you:

Linda (Support):
I’m not much of a holiday person, but my fiancée and I will visit my family on Christmas Eve for a traditional lunch/dinner. My favourite Christmas food is perunalaatikko, a type of potato gratin, and I can’t wait to get some on my plate again! I’m an avid winter swimming enthusiast, so I plan to visit the nearby lake and go for a swim either on Christmas Day or Boxing Day. I’m keeping my fingers crossed for snow – when dusk falls, it’s amazingly beautiful as the snow, the clouds and the lake assume a deep blue colour. We call this wintry phenomenom ‘sininen hetki’, or blue moment in Finnish. The water is icy, but there’s nothing that beats the feeling of tranquility after you get up from the water and wrap yourself up in a towel to watch the blue moment roll by. My favourite thing about the holidays is getting to enjoy the silence and the peacefulness of winter. Nature is resting, so it feels natural that people should take it easy and rest as well.

Petra (Writer)
For Christmas this year I plan on having a get-together dinner with a few close friends. We’ll cook together and I will attempt to bake some vegan cakes. I might need to do a few practise rounds first, though. If it doesn’t snow in Helsinki, I’m hoping to catch a glimpse of white Christmas in Central Finland while visiting relatives and family there. Most of all, however, I’m looking forward to just relaxing, binge-watching The Witcher on Netflix, reading some books, starting a playthrough of Disco Elysium and cuddling my cats (and the boyfriend).

Anna (Project Lead)
I usually have quite a traditional Finnish family Christmas I suppose, and this year is no exception! My parents live in the countryside, so me and my brother go to their house for the Christmas holidays. Christmas Eve is the main day, and the first part of it is often spent with all the last minute preparations, but in the afternoon everything quiets down. Relatives usually come to visit as well, and we have a traditional Finnish Christmas dinner (gravlax is my favorite dish), we open the presents, enjoy the warmth of the fireplace and adore the Christmas tree that is usually brought in from my parent’s backyard. And then of course, we go to the Christmas sauna! If we are lucky and there is a lot of snow, the dare of course is to go and roll in the snow in between the sauna sessions! Rest of the evening is spent socializing, relaxing and eating chocolate. Following days are reserved for food coma, walks around my home town and meeting old friends. Can’t wait! 🙂

Emma (UX Lead)
I take my family and go visit my parents for a few days over Christmas. All my siblings and their spouses and children will be there, so there’ll be quite a bunch of us. We’ll hang out, eat well, play boardgames, give gifts to each other, and generally just hang out. After a few days, we’ll go visit my spouse’s family and rinse and repeat. It’s nice to see everyone and get so much more food for a lot less effort than if we stayed at home. Also, there are more people looking after everyone’s children, so everyone has more chances to relax 😀

Ella L (Support)
I’ve always celebrated Christmas with my family and close relatives. We all live in the same city, and relatively close to each other so it is very easy for us to get together for occasions like this. Like most Finns, we have our Christmas dinner on the 24th, Christmas Eve. Me and my cousin would often joke that we never get to sit down for the dinner before 9pm. There is a lot of food to prepare and the Christmas sauna of course, and often we would find ourselves starting the dinner very late in the evening. Nowadays we have managed to start eating at more reasonable times. We have a quite traditional Christmas dinner, my favourite dishes are gravlax, smoked fish and sweetened potato casserole. After dinner we would gather around the Christmas tree to open presents. Since all the kids in the family have grown older, this event is a lot calmer and maybe less exciting as it used to be. Afterwards we have desserts and coffee and enjoy ourselves for the rest of the night. Christmas Day is a day for relaxing and enjoying the Christmas foods in a more relaxed setting, enjoying the quiet after the sometimes-hectic Christmas Eve.

What do your holiday plans look like? Any similarities with our employees’ traditions? Let us know! 😀