Another Christmas Overview

Our Christmas went peacefully as usual. This year because I didn't have to work, we managed to do some trips before enjoying our time together at MIL's place. On Christmas eve, we picked up MIL to go visit the graves. We lit some candles (we went to two different graveyards where they had MIL's parents' graves as well as FIL's parents' graves),

This is the graveyard near the old church:

 
It was -20'C that day and the sky had some pinkish colour at around 1 pm. Here are two views:

 

Then we went to visit FIL at the old people's home. He had just had lunch and he was given some coffee and joulutorttu in the kitchen.We gave him some Christmas gifts and then after we moved him to bed, he went to sleep right away, so we left and visited MIL's elder half-sister (who's also her very close friend). We gave her some chocolate and then we went back to MIL's place because BIL and SIL had promised to come at around 4 pm.We had the traditional Christmas food in Finland and then played some cards, but BIL and SIL had to leave earlier because they were going to spend Christmas with SIL's side of the family. 

MIL had asked me to buy some red wine, so I bought a bottle of French red wine, though I wasn't really sure if it was good or not because when I went to the store, there were SO many different types with different explanations, so I just chose one of them ha ha...R2 said that it wasn't too bad, but it wasn't too good, either ha ha ha...I only tasted a little 'coz I'm afraid of the rash happening again like what happened on my first Christmas in Finland.  

Anyway, after sauna we opened our gifts and R2 did get tricked!!! He thought I only gave him one gift, but I had hidden the second one in my bag. He opened the gift and thought that he only got a Donald Duck book. Only after that I gave him the second gift, which was his actual gift: a computer game he he he...He's been gaming it ever since we came back home! :-D

We stayed up late playing cards (not as late as the previous years, though! I guess we're getting older and we get tired more easily LOOOOOLLLL!!!) and then I had fun watching three squirrels chasing one another outside of MIL's apartment. They were SO cute!!!

Here's a pic of one of them. It was so dark outside already so it was hard to get a good pic. Thus I had to tamper with the pic and turned it into sepia mode:

And on Christmas day I saw a punatulkku (bullfinch) among the trees. It was SO vivid due to its red colour among the whiteness of snow. Here's a pic of it...I also had to tamper with the pic to make it brighter. Otherwise it'd look so dark.

Before Christmas I tried taking pics of natural snowflake forms on my bike, but it was SO hard. I just want to show you that when the temperature is colder and it snows, the snowflakes retain their original forms for a while when they land on non-warm spots (like this pic I took of my bike bag). It isn't the best pic (again the darkness didn't help me capture the snowflake form as well as I could), but I suppose this should do...

OK, enough for now. I'm now busy working again until New Year's eve, so not too much time to relax until then he he...