Green Christmas
DRESSED IN WHITE
In Gunilla’s home in Sweden, you’ll never find elves and red Christmas decoration items. She prefers discrete Christmas adornments and uses only white items and greenery from the forest such as spruce, box trees and wreaths made with lingonberries. She also adds lots of homemade paper stars.
Gunilla lives with her husband, Kent, in this big, beautiful, Swedish house from 1934. Their daughters flew the nest many years ago so now the couple lives in the house on their own. They bought the house in 1983 and moved in a week before Christmas when their youngest daughter was just six weeks old. They haven’t done much renovating work but they’ve painted and changed the wallpaper quite a few times, Gunilla tells us. Although it took a couple of years to convince herself, she’s very happy that she finally decided to paint the wooden floors white. With the help of Gunilla’s dad, the couple built a balcony that turns into a spare bedroom during the warm season. When they exchanged the windows in the house, they used some of the old windows for this project. The balcony is one of Gunilla’s favorite elements in the house.
Gunilla loves flea markets and she buys pieces of old furniture that she paints and renovates so that they fit to the rest of the furnishings. She likes to move things around and decorate. Just like it happened to so many of us, it all started because she had no money to buy new, expensive furniture, but she quickly discovered the joy of changing old furniture and adding a personal touch to it. Today, this has turned into a hobby as a way of creating a personal home. Inherited furniture has a special place in her heart – especially the cabinet that her dad, who was a carpenter, made for them as a wedding gift.
The couple doesn’t have a lot of special Christmas traditions but Gunilla usually starts decorating the home around the first Sunday of Advent. Wreaths, stars and lots of candles create a wonderful Christmas spirit in the entire house. The day before Christmas Eve, they bring in the Christmas tree and adorn it with crocheted stars and sometimes also with white and silver-colored Christmas bulbs. "The best thing about Christmas is that we get to spend time with our children and grandchildren. Our daughters live quite far away so we don’t see each other very often. We’ve got no less than five grandchildren and that’s why Christmas turns extra special when we’ve got plenty of time to spend with each other."
Photographer Tine Gertsen, Text Vivian Møller Christensen, Location Sweden, Images xx, Published Jeanne d arc Living 2023
