Glad Midsommar (happy midsummer)! Today was just like Christmas here. The Midsommar (midsummer) holiday meant everybody had off, there was no traffic, and most businesses were closed. It also meant celebrations.
Everywhere!
Midsummer is, apart from Christmas, one of the most important holidays in the Swedish calendar. They celebrate with smorgasbord, schnapps, and singing. Well, we skipped the schnapps since we Hedbergs don't need liquid courage to have fun. We embrace it... in any country!
We checked out of our hotel and headed to Karlstad for the festivities. Weather was sketchy but we had fun during the "rain delays," waving our little Swedish flags that may or may not have come from a dessert.
When the rain stopped and they erected the "maypole," we wanted to be sure our mom was part of the fun since her ancestors from both parents are from the region of Värmland, where we were celebrating.
We let the professionals kick things off. They were much more choreographed than the later crowd, but very enjoyable to watch.
If you ever get to see a true ancestral tradition presented by natives in period costumes, you get goose bumps. Especially if you've done family tree work for decades and really feel tied to your roots.
Pretty cool. And the dancers were very nice to us visitors from "Minnie-so-TAH."
Part of the Midsummer tradition involves wearing flower wreaths in your hair or traditional dress. There's no way we could be as cute as these two so we just dressed as your average American tourists.
Then it was time for the children to dance. And by children, they mean anyone who's a child (that's all of us, right?) or acts like one (again, that's all of us, right?). The Skol Sisters needed no prompting. We linked hands with strangers and jumped right in!
We got lucky that two teenage girls next to me were very willing to provide some interpretation to the song-dances as we circled the maypole. Once we heard the translation, there were times we laughed so hard we cried. Like when we thought the action was pretending to put food in our mouth when it was actually supposed to be pretending to put "snus" (aka snuff or chewing tobacco) in our cheek. Good lord!
There are many different Midsummer songs, the most popular is a song called Little Frogs, or Små grodorna. During this song, both adults and children hop around the maypole pretending to be frogs, singing the deep and poetic lyrics “Little frogs are funny to look at, they don’t have ears or tails." Oh yes, there is video of my making some fine ears and tail as I hop around. That is in the "what happens in Sweden stays in Sweden" vault!
I think you get the idea we were having fun! We couldn't believe only one other person from our tour group joined in. Their loss, I guess. We will laugh about our memories from today for a long, long time! Priceless.
Our tour guides captured this one. And the smiles say it all.
After our festival of fun, we started our long trek east to Stockholm. We stopped about halfway in Orebro to check out a castle from the 1300s. As most businesses were closed today, we couldn't get inside but we could walk the perimeter and take pictures and stretch our legs.
I happened upon this bench that proves once again that the Swedish and Norwegian tall genes skipped a generation! Dang.
We ended up getting to Stockholm around 7 p.m. Due to the holiday, it took us awhile to find a restaurant open. You can always count on a saloon -- especially when the World Cup is going on. All I wanted was a burger since I already had my adventurous eating today trying caviar for breakfast and accidentally trying anchovies a the Midsummer smorgasbord. My opinion?
My remedy?
Works in every country! Especially on holidays.
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