The Swedish Way of Midsummer
One thing that Sweden is known for is Midsummer. This is a popular Swedish feast where we dance around a midsummer-pole, eat meatballs and herring with early potatoes and dill. And for dessert: a lovely strawberry cake. Family and friends get together, hoping for sun and good weather, just to have a good time. At night a bonfire is often lightened and it’s BBQ time.
The origin of this feast is to celebrate the June solstice (summer solstice), but the church also celebrates a church person (John the Baptist) at the same time.
Midsummer is celebrated on the day we call Midsummer Eve, on a Friday between the 19h-25th of June every year and it is a flagday in Sweden.
It’s not a real midsummer eve without good weather, meatballs, fresh potatoes, strawberries and a midsummer pole.
The midsummer pole is a hallmark of the Swedish Midsummer. It’s a birch leaved pole shaped like a cross with two garlands of flowers hanging on it. We form a circle around this pole and sing and dance stupid dances around it. The songs are very random, about frogs, musicians and about walking around a juniper berry bush, for example. Each and every song with a different dance to it. If someone from above saw us singing these songs and dancing these dances they would think we were nuts. But it’s great fun!
Some people claim that from the very beginning the midsummer pole symbolised a penis. They say it’s a fertility symbol, and that dancing around it should give a good harvest. This makes it even funnier…
I asked my little sister what she thought about when she heard Midsummer. Her answer was that she thought about the midsummer pole, birch leaves, ox-eye daisies, kids in white dresses and flowers in their hair. In my family my grandma uses to make garlands of flowers for the kids to put in the hair.
On Midsummer Eve, you’re supposed to pick seven different flowers to put under your pillow at night. That night you will dream about the person you’re going to marry. But it’s not as easy as it sounds. The right way to do this is:
Pick seven different flowers from seven different meadows. Once you’ve picked one, you’re supposed to cross the fence to the next meadow, pick a new flower, cross another fence, and so on.
Where my family use to celebrate Midsummer Eve there is no meadow at all. Actually there aren’t many places around these days where you can find seven meadows in a row. So we just picked seven different flowers. If we picked any flowers at all. Sometimes we forgot to pick any. And most of the time we also forgot to put them under the pillow. Our family won’t ever marry it seems like…
This tradition was actually more common some decades back. And mostly the girls picked flowers. Boys felt too cool to pick flowers. But it’s a nice tradition for a child, and it gives the parents some break, when all the kids run around looking for flowers.
There is a dark side of the Midsummer celebration too. The consumption of alcohol is very high, which results in a lot of arguments and fights. And this is also one of the holidays with most accidents on the road. The drunk drivers kill a lot of people this weekend every year. It’s very sad to read the newspaper the next day.
But apart from this, Midsummer is one of the best holidays in Sweden. Everyone is in a good mood and we’re just having a great time!
