James O'Brien

Swedish class was a lot of fun tonight.

It’s two weeks since I’ve been due to holidays and just not feeling like it last week, but things still went okay.

I was anxious about the class due to the homework which was an exercise involving reflexive pronouns and reflexive verbs. My goodness, I didn’t know what they were in English, let alone Swedish. So late this afternoon I looked them up on Wikipedia, and guess what?

I think I understand them. And that’s what I said to Grant when we met at the pub tonight. Whereas Grant is great at grammar, I am, by my nature, naturally inclined not to study grammar. I was part of that generation which was experimented on, and aside from nouns and verbs, we weren’t taught much else.

But by the time I’d gotten to class, and realised I had a vague idea of what I’d missed, thinks went quite well.

Everyone was also in a good mood. And the class was large and cheerful tonight. We had lots of fun.

And I even managed to make a Swedish grammatical joke. We needed to find a word to associate with the word noggrant which means carefully and thoroughly. When Grant suggested a word, Marianne ummed and ahhed and said that wasn’t quite right in Swedish, I leant over to Grant and said, “So that’s no Grant”. Crazy eh? :)

But at the end of class I’m left with a dilemma.

Next week is our final class for the year, and as well as well as bringing along some Swedish food, it’s a probably good idea that we should translate a Swedish Christmas song as part of the class.

I mentioned to Grant my favourite Christmas song remains “Wrap Myself In Paper“. And although it’s by Magnus Carlsson it’s not in Swedish.

It’s very camp though.

I’m preparing to sing this for my work Christmas Party of course :) But, it’s in English so I can’t really translate it for Swedish class, can I?

So of course I’d like to translate a Swedish Christmas song… but do I go traditional… or do I draw upon the vast genre of Swedish Christmas albums.

And let me tell you, every Swedish singer has a Christmas album under their belt…

But which one should I do?