The night of drinking and sex. In 9 months there will be a peak of babies born in Sweden. Tonight we celebrate the longest day of the year and this year the solstice is 23:59 UTC so 00:59 in Sweden. We'll be up drinking, eating and hopefully, if the weather allows it, we'll be out in the nature enjoying it at its summer peak - all lush and green. It smells fantastic here at the moment. 
Sweden always celebrate Midsummer's Eve on the Friday around the 19-24 June as it's not convenient for business if we take off for two workingdays each year. We not only celebrate on the Midsummer's Eve as we party on during Midsummer's Day conveniently now always on a Saturday. To be honest we're more in to sleeping and eating comfort foods on the Saturday.The typical place to celebrate is out on the country side in someone's summer house. I don't have one of my own (yet?) but have been invited to a friend so I should be going instead of sitting here now but I dread the traffic. I expect to sit in hours before I reach her little house. I wish I knew how to pinpoint and share a Google Earth position in here, but for those of you up for it search for "österåker, sweden" to see where I'm heading. A typical part of the Stockholm archipelago. The amount of islands out there is just crazy! I wish we had a boat tonight so we could go around on the water, but we'll be fine just visiting the place of festivities nearby, watching people look like morons dancing around a Maypole while singing songs like "this is how we do it when we're washing our clothes..." or "the small frogs" where we squattingly jump around the pole. You have to see it to believe it.
Tradition has it we should pick 7 different flowers and put it under the pillow we'll sleep on tonight(?) to dream of our loved one. Being three single women out there tonight we might just do that.
I just found a very strange German IKEA clip on youtube which in 3 minutes summarises the whole evening, and the morning after. Not far from the truth. Reminds me how drunk people get - so I should get going!
Ah, nice. My wedding anniversary. It's a bit popular though, I had to cancel my party due to lack of interest.
ReplyDeleteJo - congrats.
ReplyDeleteDolly - hope you have a good festival evening. I did.
On the basis of the first line alone I vote Dolly organises the August gathering when she's over...
ReplyDeleteI spent a funny evening on Friday, my boyfriend and I ate some nice food, drank some wine, made a little fire and burnt some bits of paper on which we'd written down things we wanted to let go of, then we did other very pagan things.....
ReplyDeleteall in all a lovely evening!
Dolly organise the meet! if thats her sort of shenanigans party wont be happening anywhere near my house, not while shan jr is here.
ReplyDelete