The Swedes loves their christmastraditions, and God forgive if someone trying to regulate them!
On the day of Lucia (13th of december) the blond lucia offer us ofcourse gingerbread and luciabuns, but infact, the real Lucia was from Italy and not blond at all..
The scent of saffron and gingerbreadspicys are fantastic and belongs to christmas.
The way of saffron is a long and expensive way. The little yellow mark from wild crocis from Turkey and Afghanistan is handpicked by nimble fingers. 100 000 marks from crocus makes one kilo saffron, worth its weight in gold.
Gingerbread is the most important cookie for Swedes in christmastimes and an old phrase says that if you eat many gingerbreads you will be nice and gentle.
The juicy spicemix in gingerbread are cloves, jamaican pepper, cardamom, ginger and cinnamon.
Cloves are buds from the clovetree and we also use the cloves in our warm mulled wine, which is also importent in december.
Ginger is a root with a funny form, the plant has an amazing flower, and it want grow at our degrees of latitude.
If you do suffering from travelsickness, chew a piece of ginger, it helps!

Genuin cinnamon can easily be confused with the bark from the cassiatreem which is used as a cheaper variation.
The bark from the real cinnamon tree are ripped of every fourth year, and follows by an another peeling and drying.

Cardamom is the seeds from a capsule of the cardamomplant, when you have a bad breath, chew a few seeds and that bad breath is gon with the wind.

The jamaican pepper tree you will for sure find in the caribeans, after blooming the minimal fruits (more like seeds) is picked and dryed and the characteristic arom makes the Swedes comes in the right christmas mood.
A little fragrance of vanilla also belongs to christmas. Pure vanilla is coming from the pod of the vanilla orchid, which is a climbing orchid living in tropical areas.

And ofcourse there are plenty of nuts and fruit from all parts of the world who find its way to our christmastable, dades and figs from the orient, kiwis from New Zeeland, oranges from Israel, the list can be very long.

If you had the chance to visit Zanzibar, the spice island, you must visit Mr Spice, a legend who taking you around on his property and shows you all kind of things you normally have in your spicebox in your own kitchen, but on Zanzibar you can see them in their own habitat.

Well our christmas is a really worldaroundtrip for your eyes, taste and soul.