Southern Kittens

My sister has a furry catkins moustache. Cute! The big white catkins were as fluffy as I remembered them to be. Usually you can spot these willows with little kittens around the Easter, but in Lapland they appear a bit later in the spring.

She is visiting us from sunny California and we are celebrating Easter at our childhood home.

This is a young birch forest that our father a.k.a Vaari planted and now he has finally started thinning it during winter. The cut trees will be used as fire wood after drying them for one year. It is traditional to collect birch branches together with willows and place them to a vase and wait for the leaves to show.

It was raining but the hunt for catkins turned out great! We are ready to decorate our gatherings with Olavi.

Happy Easter

We are heading next week to our other Mummola. My parents live at the countryside about 600 km south from Kaukonen. Even though we are not spending Easter here, I wanted to do some traditional Easter decoration over here. We picked birch and willow branches but wondered where are the little kittens.

I brought the branches inside and after few days some green leaves started to show, but no catkins, furry kittens. Well, okay a couple but not like I'm used to see. I think it's something to do with fast growth in Lapland. My guess is that it was too warm inside the house and the willow thought that it's summer and skipped the catkins phase.

Decorations for the branches are strips of cloth. Lucky we have loads for carpet weaving! Ämmi told me that the green one is from her childhood, bed linen that she and her sister got for present some 50 years ago. Could she ever had wondered that her sons wife is using that cloth for weaving carpet and grandson is happily tying those strips for Easter decoration.

Ämmi and my sister in law Nora had made these wondering Easter witches many years ago. The one below flies in the Gray cottage.

Sledding at the Courtyard

We had really nice late winter day!

Äiji has been helping us with the snow work during the winter and created a snow hill with front loader. We made a snow tunnel and a slide run. Mummi also joined us and run the slide with her kick sled which looked bit hazardous to me.

From Kimmo's beanie you can get a hint where Olavi's other Mummola is. He is wearing the colors of Vimpelin Veto.