Pickled herring and fresh strawberries, crowns of wildflowers, hopping like a frog around a maypole adorned with greenery, fiddlers playing folk songs and a brief twilight imbued with magic.
Midsummer, a national holiday celebrating the return of light after the long, dark Nordic winter, is celebrated in nearly every city, small town and rural municipality across Sweden (though none has the ritual cult sacrifices portrayed in the 2019 horror movie “Midsommar”).
Associated with the summer solstice, Midsummer is celebrated differently across the Nordic region and beyond. In Sweden, Midsummer Eve is the main day of festivities, always on a Friday between June 19 and 25, when the sun sets late and rises again just a few hours later (except above the Arctic Circle, where it never dips below the horizon). This year it will fall on June 19.
The holiday, bigger than any other except perhaps Christmas, is a touchstone of Swedish culture, said Jonas Engman, an ethnologist specializing in Swedish traditions and folklore at Nordiska Museet in Stockholm. “The true national day should be Midsummer,” he said, not June 6, Sweden’s official National Day, which tends to pass with little fanfare.
A Party of Prophets and Pagans
The origins of Sweden’s big summer party date back to the Christianization of Scandinavia, a millennium ago, and the tradition of celebrating the prophet St. John on June 24, a practice still common in other Northern European countries, Dr. Engman said. The custom of dancing around a majstång, or maypole, decorated with greenery and flowers began in the late Middle Ages as an agrarian ritual imported from Germany to ensure a fruitful harvest.
Many pagan superstitions were, and still are, associated with Midsummer Eve, including the belief that sleeping with seven different types of flowers — picked in complete silence! — under your pillow will conjure dreams of your future beloved.
As Sweden urbanized in the 19th and 20th centuries, midsummer marked the start of the summer holidays for city dwellers who were often expected to return to the countryside to celebrate and help with the harvest, said Dr. Engman.
Even today, he said, “you’re supposed to leave the city to go to your summer cottage or take your boat out into the archipelago. If you’re in the city, in Stockholm, there’s almost no one around.”
The Epicenter of Midsummer
Heeding the directive to flee the city, many people flock to the pastoral province of Dalarna in central Sweden, about 150 miles northwest of Stockholm. The region epitomizes the Swedish countryside with sparkling lakes, rolling meadows, mossy birch forests and cottages painted Falu red, a traditional Swedish color made with pigment from local Falun mines. This is also the place for a celebration with all the bells and whistles: folk costumes, troupes of musicians and sky-high maypoles around which thousands of revelers join hands in ring dances.
“It’s the center of Midsummer,” said Par Ohlsson, the culture manager of Leksand, a small town on Lake Siljan in central Dalarna where some 30,000 people gather to watch the raising of a garland-clad maypole that stands 85 feet tall and weighs 1,700 pounds.
“When there are several thousand people dancing together around the maypole, it’s quite extraordinary,” said Stina Liljas, a retired journalist from the Leksand village of Torrberg who now works as a guide in the region. Every year she meets relatives in the same area to watch the spectacle, weather permitting.
In the Leksand region, the holiday lasts more than a day, or even a weekend. Each of the 90-odd villages also raises its own maypole, beginning the weekend before Midsummer and continuing for two weeks after, Ms. Liljas said. At these smaller celebrations, a few musicians play for the gathering of neighbors, friends, relatives and passers-by, many dressed in the traditional folk costume of their native village. For Ms. Liljas, that means a cherry-red embroidered vest over a crisp white blouse with a floral scarf tied around her shoulders; a striped red-, black- and white-banded apron over a long woven black skirt; white stockings; black shoes and a white linen cap.
“This is what people used to wear regularly as their dress clothes,” she said.
Midsummer Essentials
After raising the maypole, the dancing begins. One required song is the classic “Sma grodorna,” a ditty about small frogs with lyrics that roughly translate to:
Small frogs, small frogs, so funny they are to see (repeat).
No ears, no ears, nor tails do they have (repeat).
Qu ack ack ack, Qu ack ack ack, Qu ack ack ack ack kaa (repeat).
The corresponding dance sequence includes hopping like a frog around the maypole for the last two nonsensical lines — as the Swedish actor Alexander Skarsgard once demonstrated on “The Tonight Show.”
On Edholma, an island in Stockholm’s archipelago with some 100 homes, Midsummer is celebrated a bit differently, with private festivities on Midsummer Eve and a public gathering on Midsummer Day, said Magnus Rittnor, a Stockholm account manager who has a summer home on the island and helps organize the annual celebration.
“We have games for the kids and coffee and fika,” he said, referring to the Swedish custom of having something sweet to eat with coffee.
And of course there’s a Midsummer feast.
The fare varies, but almost everyone agrees on three essentials: multiple varieties of pickled herring, fresh new potatoes boiled with dill and the first strawberries of the season served with whipped cream. There’s beer and “snaps” — small shots, usually aquavit, to either sip or down in one go during a round of Swedish drinking songs.
“We always do a herring cake,” he said, paired with Champagne, “but that’s not traditional.”
Celebrations Far and Wide
Travelers in Sweden will find public celebrations in every corner of the country. Head to Riksgransen to party under the midnight sun, set sail for an island in the archipelago, delve into traditional festivities in Dalarna or partake in the classic celebrations at Skansen in Stockholm.
In the United States, the Swedish consulate throws a great party in Battery Park City (which this year will be held on Saturday, Midsummer Day, since Midsummer Eve coincides with Juneteenth), and Swedish communities across the country host events, like the Sveadal Midsummer Festival in the San Francisco Bay Area.
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