I know, I know… the holidays are over but I’m still catching up here on the blog and I wanted to share some of the photos I posted on my instagram (instagram.com/studioeriksdotter).

I love this photo Casey took when my niece, Corinne, was opening our gifts. I had a tinkerbell theme to her gifts this year and she loved it.

We always have a “holiday card wall” every year. I love getting hand written letters and cards in the mail so the holiday season is a treat for me. Unfortunately, I thought of ours too late and with a packed painting schedule it was just too late. It’s already in the calendar for November next year – you live and you learn.  Previously, we’ve done everything from hand-made cards to Christmas letter.

We headed to Casey’s parents for a day during Christmas and due to traffic we went through Gettysburg. I find it so eerie passing through the battlefields. Thank god it was still light outside.

Christmas Eve was wonderfully relaxing. First we spent it at my sister’s (see first photo) and then Casey and I opening our gifts surrounded by blankets and kitties. Casey surprised me with my favorite Swedish candy this year, Kexchoklad! Of course they didn’t last long! ha! And Casey didn’t get one single bite.

We took many long walks and got this pedometor that measures how many steps I take – anything to encourage myself to walk more. I really need to move my body more and I’ve been keeping it up so far. Do you walk? What do you do to encourage yourself to move more?

I picked up genealogy again. Taking 2 weeks off from any studio work gave me some time to spend on some other hobbies, one being genealogy. Tracing your roots in Sweden is a little more time-consuming compared to just typing in a few names in Ancestry.com, which I use when doing my husband’s genealogy. Swedish documents goes back to 1600 but they are all scanned, and most aren’t transcribed to a database so you have to go through each page. Oh well – you get to enjoy beautiful handwriting at least. If you can read it!

We caught up on several movies. Rasmus had a hard time staying awake though…

I promised myself to take time off but I couldn’t keep it. I had so much time on my hands in the evenings and on the weekends I wanted to re-shoot some paintings that had bugged me on the site, see Skyline I for example. And I finally have better photos of all the limited editions as well.

On NYE, our friends Salih and Jennifer stopped by before Salih headed back to San Francisco where he moved to from NYC (he ended up celebrating NYE twice! Once in the sky and then he arrived in SF just as it turned midnight).  Casey and Salih have known each other for a long time and he’s one of my dearest friends. He has a heart of gold and is one of the people who I respect the most, and who supports me the most.

Jennifer was dog sitting for a few days and brought this adorable Shiba Inu named Pippa. I fell in love!

Lola had eagerly awaited NYE for a couple of days. She loves celebrating the Swedish New Year at 6pm EST when we watch the count-down on Swedish TV, snack on all kinds of delicious seafood and toast in champagne.  I mean, she most likely naps through it but she enjoys it nonetheless.

I could eat seafood every day and for NYE we had some mouthwatering clams, homemade gravlax, Swedish shrimp and a cheese spread to name a few things. Nothing fancy just yummy stuff to enjoy while we were polishing off some Trivial Pursuit (read: Erica losing to Casey over and over again).

Hope your holidays were lovely!