Midsommarafton (Midsummer night) was believed to be a time of powerful and secret forces. Everything was animated: the dew, the flowers, the twigs of the trees and the water in the wells. People also claimed that if a young woman placed a bouquet of seven or nine different flowers under her pillow that night she would dream of her future love. She must remain alone while picking the flowers and observe total silence. A flower from the churchyard increased the magical powers of the bouquet, as did picking flowers from the banks of three different roads at a crossroads.
Today Midsummer is a national holiday in Sweden. Families and friends meet and eat pickled herring and new potatoes washed down with schnapps and beer. Camping is a popular activity as numerous people flee the cities for their summer cottages. And flee the city they do, I’ve never seen Stockholm so void of people. It feels like Robin and I (and a bag of tourists) are the only people in the city.
To celebrate Midsommarafton Robin and I headed to Skansen, the place to go for traditional Swedish events in Stockholm. If you recall this is the same place I went for Valborgsmässoafton. We wandered around the park for a bit, watched some people in traditional clothing raise a
maypole. Maypoles are believed to be part of an old fertility rite, the pole being a phallus that "impregnates" Mother Nature. It was hoped that properly celebrating this rite would help to give a good harvest in the autumn. Once the pole was raised it was time to dance around it. For example there is an apparently famous 'frog dance' (små grodorna). After the pole was raised, and we had our fill of dancing, Robin and I built a crown made out of sticks and leaves. Don’t ask me what the significance of this is, it seemed like the thing to do. We put daisy’s in Robin, and my crown resembled a bush on my head. To see more fantastic pictures go here.
By the way, today the official sunrise was 3:29 and the sunset is 22:10, that’s nearly 20hrs of daylight. But the sun really never goes down, as there is always a bright glow to the west. Here is a picture from my back deck pointing east at 11:29pm (left side), and another shot pointing west 11:26pm (right side).
