Star boys from Oulu

Oulu is a "tiernacity"
The brightest stars of the season are of course the Star Boys, who make their rounds singing the traditional Christmas story. Here you can listen an example. Part 1 Part 2

Finnish Christmastime

Waiting

Waiting starts from the first Advent. We light candles on each Advent Sunday. From the first of December we open a new window from the Christmas calendar. We also have one in our class. Each pupil can open one window and get something nice from the woolen sock.





Santa Claus's workshop


Little Christmas party

It is quite usual to have a little Christmas party. We have one in our school and almost all adults have one with their colleagues. Christmas songs, candies and other delicious foods play on important role in Finnish little Christmas.

Decorative things

Angels, lights and other decorative things decorates our house. Usually Christmas tree is a spruce. It is brought in to the house on Christmas eve or couple of days before.



TV programs

Few weeks before Christmas TV stations starts to send programs related to Christmas. This means that Santa Claus and gnomes are often seen in the programs in Christmastime.

Christmas food

Carrot, potato and turnip bakes with ham are traditional finnish Christmas foods. In some families they replace ham with turkey. Adults eat also some fish like salted salmon and flavoured herring.

Relatives

At Christmas we meet our relatives. It is quite common to share Christmastime with whole family including grandparents. It's unusual to meet frinds in Christmas eve.

Christmas songs







The Christmas songs tells about important persons like Jesus Christ. These songs will be sang at school, at home and in the church. We have a Christmas song for every subject. Some persons do plays while the songs are sang.



Famous Finnish band presenting "Parade of Gnomes" in Finnish http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UE5YOMcHrpU&feature=PlayList&p=204007A737B7ED76&index=16


Christmas eve

In the morning:
· opening of the last window of the Christmas calendar
· TV
· some presents (some families)
· decorating the Christmas tree
· rice pudding for breakfast
· church and candles to the graveyard (some families)

During the daytime:

Nervous and furious waiting of Santa Claus!

In the evening:
· Santa Claus is coming!
· presents
· eating, eating, eaaating….
· playing
· TV
· relaxing

Christmas dinner tables

At the English lesson we drew these wonderful Christmas dinner tables with traditional Fínnish delicacies. On Friday we finished our letters to our Sicilian friends and our teacher posted them. We hope that our new friends will get them before Christmas!

Hanna

Snowman- competition

Today we had a wonderfull winter day. The temperature was round 0 decrees and it was snowing. This means that the snow is rather wet and you can make snowballs and snowmen of it.
We decided to arrange a snowman competition between classes during breaks. We got 17 different snowmen. Which one should be the winner? Make a comment to vote.

More pictures

Christmas in Finland

We are baking some gingerbreads...

Finnish activities

The idea of this blog is to share the pieces of finnish culture and experienced activities from our school. Have fun while reading.