When it's -15 degrees celcius outdoors, it feel so much colder here by the sea in Turku than in the inland area where I grew up. -15 isn't freezing cold yet, and you can still find enough warm clothes to layer and not feel terribly cold outside. But you can't wrap a scarf around your lungs. The cold goes in with every breath you take. I've never been very good at breathing. Wrapping a scarf over your face is an option, but after a while the scarf is all wet and smells of a wet animal (for some reason, more like a wet dog than a wet sheep), so that's not something you want to do when the temperature isn't too bad yet. So first you breathe through your nose, and it's going fairly well, but after a short while you have a runny nose, and it's too cold to take of your mittens and blow your nose every two minutes, and in the long run you don't want to use your mittens to wipe your nose, for obvious reasons (okay, fine, sometimes a girl's gotta do what a girl's gotta do), so you start breathing through your mouth. And that hurts. Quite a lot. The cold air makes you cough and the coughing makes your eyes water and the tears make your face freeze (and your mascara run, if you happen to wear something that's not waterproof). And when you finally get to go in, it's still going to hurt, the breathing, the face, all that. But once your breathing is back to normal and the cold white spots in the middle of your red blotchy cheeks are turning reddish again, you really feel like you've done something brave. (And forgotten the eggs you were supposed to buy while doing it.)

The advent calendar is now officially done, and the first box will be revealed on Wednesday. Not only here, but also live in the lovely cafe I mentioned earlier, Bossaliina! Yay for that! Photos will follow, once December really gets going.