=================================================================== Christmas Dinner 2025-12-24 =================================================================== Christmas in Finland arrives the same way every year: silently, insistently, and with the emotional temperature of a bus stop in January. The light is gone. The sun makes a token appearance sometime between "too late" and "don't bother." Everything is wrapped in darkness, candles, and an unspoken agreement that we will all *feel something*, damn it. And then there is the dinner... On Christmas Eve, of course, because in Finland the main ordeal happens *before* the actual holiday, leaving the 25th as a kind of cultural hangover. The Christmas dinner is spoken of with reverence. *Joulupöytä.* A word that suggests tradition, warmth, continuity. What it actually means is that I spend several days performing unpaid kitchen labour while everyone else drifts in and out of the room like benevolent ghosts, asking helpful questions such as "Is it supposed to look like that?" and "What time do we eat?". I do all the fecking cooking. All of it. Planning, shopping, prepping, peeling, roasting, timing, coordinating. The logistics alone would qualify as a small military exercise. The oven becomes contested territory. The fridge resembles a cold-storage crime scene. There are lists. There are contingency plans. There is the quiet, creeping knowledge that if *one* dish is wrong, Christmas is somehow "ruined," as if the entire year balances on the structural integrity of a root vegetable casserole. Ah yes, the casseroles... Lanttulaatikko, porkkanalaatikko, perunalaatikko. Beige food, heroically resisting flavour, eaten once a year out of obligation rather than desire. (Side note, for the record: my beetroot and sweet potato casseroles are absolutely to die for. Naturally, this only highlights how little the rest of the spread deserves its reputation.) These dishes exist in a strange temporal bubble: nobody wants them in November, nobody touches them in January, but on Christmas Eve they are sacred artefacts. Question them and you are clearly the problem. Then there's the ham. The Great Ham. The centrepiece. This year it weighs five kilograms. Five. For a family of three: my wife, my daughter, and me. This is, apparently, considered normal. A slab of pig that requires hours of careful roasting, glazing, resting, and ceremonial slicing. Everyone has opinions about the ham. Nobody helps with the ham. The ham is somehow both my responsibility and shared cultural property that I am merely entrusted with. It must be treated with reverence, discussed in hushed tones, and sliced *just so*, as if it were less food and more a national monument. And since I will be the one eating most of those five kilograms over the following days - cold, reheated, or directly from the fridge while pretending not to be hungry - I suppose I am now officially on the keto diet. Not out of health consciousness or dietary conviction, but because my cyclist metabolism will quietly convert vast quantities of pork into "recovery fuel." No apps, no tracking, no wellness ideology-just ham, again and again, rationalised as endurance nutrition. This is not a diet; it is post-ride damage control. What makes this especially funny - ironic even - is that I'm not even Finnish. I'm Dutch. I've merely lived here for nearly thirty years, long enough to inherit all the obligations but none of the ancestral authority. I stand there, basting, thermometer in hand, while someone explains how their grandmother did it differently, as if that information has any practical value now. By the time we sit down to eat, I already know how this will go. I will be done before I begin. Not physically - there will still be washing up - but spiritually. I will have smelled the food for hours. Tasted everything repeatedly "just to check." My appetite will be eroded by stress, heat, and the sound of questions. I will eat because it would be socially unacceptable not to, not because I want to. Around the table, people will relax. They'll pour drinks. Lean back. Declare the food "very good" in that vague, non-committal way that suggests no further engagement is required. Plates will be filled, half-emptied, abandoned. Someone will disappear for a nap. Someone else will check their phone. I will calculate how long the dishes can sit before becoming tomorrow's problem. And yet this ritual persists. Not because it is enjoyable, but because it is familiar. Christmas in Finland is less about joy and more about endurance. We survive the dark. We light candles against the void. We eat heavy food to remind ourselves we are still corporeal. We perform tradition the way one performs maintenance on an old house: not because it's fun, but because if you stop, something important might collapse. Later, when the kitchen finally goes quiet and everyone else is comfortably horizontal, I know I will be standing alone with a sponge, staring into the sink, wondering how a season supposedly about rest became this exhausting, performative exercise in obligation. But there is consolation... Tomorrow is training day. Non-negotiable. I don't care that it's Christmas. The bike doesn't celebrate holidays, and neither do my legs. In the cold, on empty roads, pedalling away the casseroles and the cultural weight, things will make sense again. That, more than any candle or carol, will feel like the truest tradition I actually believe in.