Midsummer

Festival Location: Holo, Sweden

Festival Type(s): Traditional Festivals, Summer Festivals, Parties

Midsummer Media:

Midsummers in Sweden

by © Glenn Morrison 2009

I've discovered that Scandinavian summers are different to those in Australia. For instance, they have a middle. The middle in this case being Midsummer, a festival celebrating the longest day of the year, which in this part of the world can be pretty much an entire day.

My first Midsummer festival was in Sweden and involved a huge party at my friend's house, who invited her friends who had just finished school and were ready to go out into the world and win rally car races or mobile phone technology scholarships or if they weren't complete Swedish failures a Nobel Prize or two.

Whatever took place that night it was enough to make me want to come back for another dose of Swedish Midsummer-pitality. So during our most recent trip through the Baltic's Princess, Doddo and I made the 18-hour ferry journey from Estonia to Stockholm and down to the village of Hölö to catch up with our Swedish mates and some of their whacky, zany Midsummer-ness.

Midsummer starts as a "just for the kids" affair during the day, and ends in an all-out drunken binge at night which I'm sure emotionally scars those same kids for the rest of the year. Or at least until July's crayfish parties which I've heard put Midsummer to shame in the area of debauchery.

First there is dancing around the maypole, which probably dates back to pagan times but I'm not really sure so I won't go pretending that I actually enquired at the time. Naturally we had no idea what the dances were about other than they were in Swedish, they were hell funny and they were "mostly for the kids". We started off being sleeping bears, I'm not sure what it was all about but pretty soon there were grownups chasing each other and knocking over small children and mothers bandaging wounds. Yeah, "just for the kids" lasted a good three minutes.

Then there was the feast of St. Midsummer. Ok there is no St. Midsummer but if there was I'm sure it would have fitted nicely into my story. The feast was mostly potatoes and salad with pickled herring and vodka shots. I don't know if vodka is traditional at Midsummer but my Swedish mates Pelle and Anders seemed to like it a lot. A real lot.

We moved on to the seaside outdoor leisure centre, being Pelle's Estonian wood-fired sauna and spa, which we'd spent most of the morning heating up. And drinking beer. Stoking a sauna requires simultaneous drinking of beer. Obviously.

We managed a few more vodkas and shots of home-made whisky, but seriously Swedish whisky is crap so I had to try something in order to avoid wasting myself before the pool party had even begun. So we started taking long run ups out of the sauna and jumping off the end of Pelle's pier into the cold sea. Well Pelle, Anders and Doddo did. I went back to the sauna to pour my whisky out.

Back at the house the pool party had started without us. Apparently the women folk had been calling Pelle telling him to bring us home, but he was too busy diving off piers and calling Aussies who won't drink whisky girly-boys.

By the time we got back to the party the games had started, silly Swedish games they were and they involved treasure hunts and blindfolded football and me mostly ignoring them and talking to Swedes.

After this the feast of St. Midsummer's brother St. Olaf the Grouse began, I think, well I'm not really sure as by now I had drunk about $100 worth of beer (less than a dozen, this is Sweden remember), and was considering asking Pelle where he kept that fine drop of home-made whisky.

The pool party ran its usual course. Fairly predictable, you know how it is, the odd swim, half hour in the sauna with four nude Swedish blokes singing "it's getting hot in here, so take off all your clothes", fight with the missus about scaring some kids when in the nude or something I can't quite remember, tackling a lesbian onto some mattresses in the lounge room (we've all done that one), unsuccessfully trying to convince Pelle to come inside out of the rain after he'd passed out on the lawn. All the usual stuff.

And the most important thing is that we all remembered the true meaning of midsummer, and that St. Midsummer and his brother St. Olaf the Grouse were remembered once again for all the right reasons, and peace, love and nude saunas are alive and well in the land of the midnight bum: Sweden. What a place!

by Glenn Morrison

Midsummer Photos: