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Yesterday was the first Advent and here in Sweden that's the start of Christmas season. When you have one foot in two different cultures you cherry pick; so the Christmas boxes came out after Thanksgiving.

Little more than a year ago I had a small stroke, so I'm not comfortable flying yet. It's strange not spending Thanksgiving in Dallas and I miss family and friends. I miss the warmth of Texas winter too, especially when I look outside the window; the snow is still falling and the ground is covered in a white blanket.

On the other hand it's fun to take some time off and do the Christmas decorations. In Sweden the Christmas tree goes up just a few days before Christmas Eve and stays throughout January. So in our cherry-picking-culture-thingy-Christmas-tradition it goes up after Thanksgiving and stays throughout January.

Recently I thought a lot about the food we eat. How dangerous is it? Things that was good for us a few years back, are suddenly disastrous and vice versa.

Now the mighty antioxidants have fallen. These miraculous little things that could save us from everything dangerous have a back side; they also boost cancer cells.

I have a friend who used to drink large quantities of green tea, just for the antioxidants; she doesn’t even like it. She drinks it because she believes in its benefits. She is battling cancer, it has spread twice and I can’t help thinking if the antioxidants play a part of it.

A cousin of mine recently had a heart attack. He doesn’t eat sugar or red meat. He always exercises and he hasn’t an ounce of fat on his body. He doesn’t drink and he have never smoked, but he ended up with a heart attack. He told me afterwards that the only thought he had in the ambulance was; How could this happen to me? I don’t do anything wrong?

I read an interesting article in Washington Post yesterday. It was about women dress sizes and how they have changed during the last decades. The key point was that the average American woman today weighs about as much as the average 1960s man. This fact has changed the standards for dress sizes. What was a size 12 in 1958 is equal to a size 6 today.

That’s actually very interesting, especially since the generation that was young in the 58s still buys dresses. My mother has always regarded herself as a little on the chubby side and she has a tendency to buy cloth that’s at least one size to big, sometimes even worse. If you ask her, she will tell you that she is a size 12 and when she walks into a store, that’s where she’s headed.

One more picture from my new cookbook that will be out the week before Thanksgiving. The weather is getting cold, but that didn’t stop me from doing a nice barbeque yesterday and of course I need a picture.

My husband claims that most food we eat right now goes cold before we can dig into it, since it has to be photographed. I don’t like food to go to waste so we have eaten everything I made for Christmas Magic, though sometimes a little colder that intended.

It’s not easy to take pictures of food, especially when it smells delicious and the smell spreads out into the house. If you’re not hungry before, you will be after a few minutes starring at a plate through a camera.

Right know I’m working on a Christmas cook book, the first book in a new series called “The Ultimate Christmas Handbook.”

The first book is called Christmas Magic and is all about Christmas traditions and where they come from. This is just a small sneak peek at one of the pictures in the book.

This is what we ate for dinner tonight, a fried beef with cranberry jelly on a salad. Delicious if I may say so myself.