Today is “Tjugondedag Knut”, that is, the 20th day after the Christmas, and in fact St. Knut or Canute’s Day. The day Christmas stuff comes down in Sweden. This year, it was accompanied by massively early flowers, rather than the usual snow.

The first Christmas things went up on the first Sunday of Advent, the stars and rows of lights in our windows. The rest of the decorations followed slowly afterwards, ending with the tree. Swedes put up their Christmas trees much later than Americans do, but then they have to stay up until January 13.

It’s a bit sad taking down the lights in the windows. They fill a valuable role in lighting things up during the darkest part of the winter. Things are a lot lighter now, but sunrise is still at around 8:35 AM, only 10 minutes earlier than the shortest day.

When the kids were babies, it was very nice having those lights up for middle of the night feedings. Of course, that need ended 13 years ago for us.

Like many other places getting rid of everyone’s Christmas trees is always a problem. The training school for missionaries a couple of blocks away used to be one of the places here on Lidingö that hosted a Walpurgis Eve bonfire on April 30. Many of us used to keep our trees in our backyards until the snow melted in the spring, and then hauled them (we used baby carriages back then) to the bonfire spot. Unfortunately the school discontinued hosting the bonfire a few years ago.

In recent years the city government has organized a Christmas tree pick-up. This year’s is scheduled for January 22.

It’s just as well the tree won’t be in the backyard longer than that, since there isn’t any snow. Most years we don’t even have any real access to our backyards until late March/early April.

The people in our row of attached houses usually put up white lights in the trees in front of each until on the first Advent. Rather than taking them down on January 13, however, our custom has been to wait until Easter, largely because it isn’t much fun taking them down in the snow. This year we have new neighbors and not everyone put up lights. We’ll see if those how did keep them as long as usual. After all, there isn’t any snow right now.

This season has been strange because of this lack of snow. The first snowfall of the season was an extremely heavy storm at the end of October, definately a sign of climate change. But after that melted, there was no snow at all until just a couple of days ago, another sign of extreme weather. It has almost all melted now, and this morning I noticed flowers in our lawn.

Of course, there’s nothing about extreme weather and climate change to prevent a massive snow storm in February or March.