My first night in Sweden, my parents took me to a traditional Christmas dinner, a Julbord, at a big old house in the country. The cool thing about a Julbord is that you don’t have to wait until the day of Christmas to have one, and you can eat one more than once during December.

Basically, it’s a big buffet dinner (a smörgåsbord, sorta) where the objective is to try as many different things as possible. This involves taking very, very tiny portions of many things and savoring each one carefully. The Swedes go crazy over stuff like pickled herring (very tasty) and lutfisk (scary, intimidating.) And yes, real genuine Swedish meatballs made an appearance.

The house itself was a huge shambling old mansion in the country with a sort of Adams-family-meets-royal-family motif to it. Everywhere you looked, there were taxidermied animals, strange anonymous old portraits, and ornate Victorian furniture. If there was an overarching theme to the evening, it would have been “MEAT,” from the stuffed animals to the dusty hunting scenes on the walls, to the thinly-sliced reindeer steaks and 100 different kinds of paté at the buffet table. This was definitely no place for vegetarians.

Unfortunately, what I thought was a little cold back in NYC has now erupted into a full-blown flu, with a mild fever and a nasty hacking cough and a sore throat and the whole nine. I’m especially pissed off because I actually got a flu shot this year but I guess I was unlucky enough to pick up some weirdo strain of the flu that the shot doesn’t cover.

At least this is only the beginning of my two weeks here, so maybe I’ll get better in time to enjoy Christmas proper.