It's Christmas!

A package! For me! It must be Christmas or something. I'm not particularly used to getting anything in the mail, thankfully even the bills tend to come adressed to my wife, but a fairly large sized parcel dropped through the letterbox this morning, with my name on it! I was actually reasoning whether I should wait until Christmas morning in case it contained an unwrapped gidft, when I noticed the postmark of the sender - Svenska Fjällklubben!

Without further ado I tore open the package, Christmas had come early this year. Inside I have a veritable assortment of interesting snippets for any lover of the mountains, Svenska Fjällklubbens Årsbok 2010-2011 and Fjället magazine's Winter 2010 issue. These will be somewhat slow going for me, as it always is with Swedish, though this will only get better with time. Also I don't really want to interrupt Chris Townsend's Vandrarens lilla handbok (the Backpacker's Handbook translated into Swedish) which I took out of the library last week, but it does give me a fantastic amount of reading material for the holidays.

I can also commend Svenska Fjällklubben on their choice of membership card. It may just be a credit card sized piece of cardboard with an ispiring image of a mountain on the front (being relatively new to Scandinavia I can't yet identify it, I can say that it's certainly not in Scotland). Of course this realtive simplicity is also it's greatest strength, it easily fits into my lightweight money clip, takes up very little room, and weighs next to nothing (it didn't even register on my kitchen scale). Much better than my STF membership card which is made of quite thick plastic (5g) and which I shall begrudgingly take with me on the Kungsleden this Summer, but at other times is actually stowed away with my passport. It may not seem like much, but when you think of all the cards that you carry around in your wallet, it soon mounts up; for the trail I generally only carry my bankcard, ID, moneyclip and a couple of notes, (why carry your library card halfway accross Lappland?) but I think I'll let this card come along too! A small paper card is also in my opinion much more sustainable than plastic, especially here in Scandinavia, and it's biodegradeable.

Oh, and Merry Christmas to you too! I hope that exciting parcels also grace your doorstep this week, indeed why don't you tell me about what you've got or what you're expecting?