23-06-2021, 01:43 PM
1
Midsummer celebrations in Sweden
This weekend we celebrate Midsummer starting on Friday with Midsummer's eve celebrations. Christmas and Midsummer are the two biggest holiday weekends in Sweden.Our Midsummer holiday is always the weekend between the 20th and 26th of June even if the summer solstice falls on another day. Midsummer's Eve (Friday) is a time for families to gather and celebrate the longest day of the year with traditional activities. We dress the Midsummer Pole (something like a Maypole in England) with birch twigs and flowers and raise it amid music and cheering. We then dance ring dances round the pole (similar to Ring a ring of rosies). Many people wear traditional Swedish folk dress which makes a colourful addition to the celebrations. In many places there are organised celebations in which the Midsummer pole is carried in by people dressed in folk dress accompanied by folk musicians and the Swedish flag. This is often followed by exhibitions of folk dancing. Sadly these organised gatherings didn't take place last year due to Covid and the same applies this year too.
Swedish folk dress today is only worn on special occasions but in days gone by it was everyday clothing for people living in rural areas and differed from region to region and from village to village. Today you will see different variations of folk dress depending on where you are. This is the folk dress that most people wear but there is a national folk dress in the Swedish colours of blue and yellow.
One tradition that is part of Swedish folklore says that if a girl goes out into the countryside, picks seven different species of wild flowers and puts them underneath her pillow on Midsummer's Eve then she will dream of the person she will marry.
Katarina and I will be putting flowers under our pillows and I’m sure we will dream of each other.
Another tradition is of course the family gathering and we will have our own little Midsummer pole in the garden to dance round and then we finish off with the Swedish smörgåsbord as the main meal of the day. We lay the table with Midsummer table cloths - paper ones nowdays as they're more practical and decorate it with flags, streamers and other bunting.
There'll be fourteen of us including Katarina, her mother and little sister who'll all be with us for the first time and Katarina, my mum and I are now busy preparing many of the dishes that will be on the table.
Here are some photos to give you an idea of the way we celebrate Midsummer in Sweden. The last picture is Crown Princess Victoria and her family with the princesses wearing the Swedish natinal folk dress. I’ll try and post some of my own later in the week.
I do like to see the old folk customs
It certainly looks a very happy time of the year.
23-06-2021, 07:41 PM
8
Re: Midsummer celebrations in Sweden
That's the trouble with the UK - all of our traditions (especially English) are being slowly eroded. Long gone is the dancing around the Maypole, Morris Dancers are being culled over accusations of racism, and Summer Solstice celebrations at Stonehenge are being stopped by the H&S brigade. Even the annual pancake races at Ripon have been cancelled, and the Cheese-Rolling festival in Gloucester is slowly being phased out because of potential injuries, irrespective that competitors come from all over the world to take part in this traditional foolery.
|
|
