Happy Holidays to all of you

Happy Holidays and Happy New Year dear friends to you all around the world. This picture is taken in Akureyri which is the biggest city in northern Iceland. The church is a Protestant Lutheran church. The building is located in the center of the city and towers above it up on a hill. The steps leading up to its front door are about one hundred. The architect was Guðjón Samúelsson and the church was completed in 1940.  The old stained glass window above the altar is a part of a set which was destroyed in an air raid on Coventry Cathedral in England.

Fireworks

The picture shows you how we celebrate the new year.  It is a custom in Iceland to fire a lot of fireworks just before the beginning of the new year. We were with our family in Akureyri and just around midnight everything was in full swing. The sky was lit with fireworks, all in such beautiful colors. Afterward, we wished our family Happy Holidays and a Happy New Year, took a glass of champagne and made a toast (SKÁL in Icelandic) to the New Year.

Looking back

At this time of the year, we tend to look back and think about all the things that have happened in the last twelve months. We also make promises to ourselves to make the next year more prosperous.  We have a bottle that keeps written notes from the year before. Everybody has made him or herself a promise what to do in the coming year. So after breaking the bottle we read it aloud and see what we have done. Then we take a new bottle, write our promises and goals for the new year down and put them in the bottle. It is a nice tradition.

Last year

We have traveled a lot, met a lot of friends and also made new connections. We have been to places like Namibia, South Africa, new towns in Greenland, Sweden, Poland and a lot of new places as we bicycled from Key West, Florida to New York City in the USA. Last but not least we have taken tons of pictures that will preserve all these precious moments and memories. We now look forward to days that lie ahead of us with our family here in Iceland. Again we will all come together in the north during the last days of this year. Akureyri here we come with our skis and good humor.

Happy Holidays Happy New Year

We wish all of you our friends in our Social Media Cosmos and around the world a Happy Holidays Happy New Year. We hope we will see you in Iceland the year 2019.

How this picture was taken

The picture was taken with a Nikon D850 with a 17-35 mm f/2.8 Nikkor lens at 26 mm. ISO 125,  Aperture  f/22, 8 sec, with a Really Right Stuff tripod.