Midsummer - A strange holiday

Midsummer is celebrated, as the name suggests, in the middle of the summer. On the weekend closest to the 24th of July, more exactly. The origin of the holiday is disputed. The Christian church claims that it is celebrated to honour saint John the Baptist, whose saints day is on 24th of July, but the most likely answer is that it was a fertility feast that has its origins in the Viking Age 900 AD - 1060 AD (I am talking about the Swedish Midsummer holiday, if you not have guessed that yet).

The most traditional of the events in modern Midsummer is the Midsummerpole (or Maypole). It is a high cross-like pole with two rings hanging from the "arms" of the cross. The whole thing is dressed with birchwood-leaves and flowers (if you follow the tradition, there should be 9 kinds of flowers). Then you stick it in the ground in the middle of a field and gather a lot of people to dance around the pole. You dance to songs like "Smoe Grodorna" (The little frogs) and "Jaenta och jag" (Something like "Girl and me"), which are two old childhood songs (That is NOT fun, believe me!). The Midsummerpole is also a disputed thing; some claim the tradition was imported from Germany around 1700 AD and others say that it is a fertility- symbol from the Viking Age (You don't need a lot of imagination to figure out what it looks like) which was worshipped to bring good harvests and to please the gods.

Another old tradition, which almost no one practises anymore, is that young, unmarried people should go to a crossroads and pick 9 different kinds of flowers and put them under their pillow when they go to bed. When doing all this, they were not allowed to speak, laugh or make any noise. If they manage to do all this, they will dream, in the night, about the one that they will marry in the future. Quite odd, don't you think?

A long time ago, the Midsummernight was believed to have magical powers. Nature acted in strange ways that night. The water in rivers and lakes turned to wine, the leaves tasted like honey, and so on. If you were going to cast a spell, pick medical herbs or find a treasure, the Midsummernight was the time to do it.

Now, one last thing, the food you eat in the Midsummer. The days are very long at this time, so you can eat outside almost the whole night. You eat dill-boiled potatoes and pickled herring, or herring with mustard. With that you consume (if you are old enough) lots of alcohol, mostly beer and "snaps", vodka served in small glasses. That's all for now.

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Oskar Ahrenberg