Jani Penttinen

Merry Christmas, Fei! We didn't have much of traditional Christmas this time, but we'll try to do better next year. I guess you are still too young to actually undertand anyway, your life circles pretty tightly around your own belly and you're happy as long as your little needs are taken care of.


One huge difference between your mom and I is that since she's from China, she has never actually celebrated Christmas, or even her birthday. They just don't do that in China, or at least didn't do when she was growing up.

Since your mom hasn't experienced the excitement of birthday or Christmas, she just doesn't think of it the same way as I do. For example, we bought a lot gifts for you both for birthday and for Christmas but she was just way too excited about it to wait for the actual days and you basically got to open some gift boxes almost every day during December!


I must say it wasn't entirely her fault either. Since you learned to love opening gifts you became pretty good at spotting them and a few times it happened that you just walked to us with a wide smile on your face, holding a gift box and saying "Open, open!" Next year we're going to have actually hide the gifts!

This obviously meant that when your birthday came, we didn't actually have any gift prepared for you. Fortunately we found a really cool remote controlled racing car from the Ferrari Store in Serravalle that you absolutely loved - problem solved, that would be your birthday gift!


For Christmas we figured we won't need to have gifts, but on the very last moment we decided to go to the kids section in a local department store and picked some books and Disney movies for you and had them gift wrapped, so we actually had some gifts to open on Christmas too.

Our Christmas meals were mostly Chinese, definitely not traditional Christmas food. I bought a Christmas cake and some cookies, but that's all. In the spirit of the season though, we've been eating a lot.

On the Christmas eve, after opening some of the gifts, I made some yummy Finnish pancakes (known around the world as Swedish pancakes...), and then we all crawled in warm blankets to watch Mickey Mouse's Christmas Carol. While watching the movie, we ate the pancakes with ice cream and fresh berries. We had strawberries, raspberries and blueberries, but you seem to think they're all called strawberries!

Our theory is that you think the other names just mean the same in different languages... since we also had cherries and bananas, which you have no problem naming correctly.

You loved the movie so much you didn't want to sleep at all, you just wanted to see it over and over again! It was Christmas after all, so we let you get your wish, which kind of backfired later when you got too tired and cranky but because of all the excitement couldn't fall asleep. Still, it was a really family moment that I will remember for a long time.