Cheer as sunlight fills the sky！ Sweden’s Midsummer Festival kicks off in June

Article by MOOK Scenic Spots Family Travel Life Network, reported and compiled by Chen Guanxin

For most people, sunlight is as ordinary as air and water, but for those in Nordic countries, where daylight lasts only about eight hours a day, sunshine is especially precious. Therefore, people in the Nordic nations will hold “Midsummer Festival” activities for three consecutive days before the end of June to celebrate surviving the long winter nights and the arrival of the summer solstice. The Midsummer Festival is celebrated not only in Nordic countries such as Sweden, Denmark, and Finland, but also in Eastern Europe, the UK, Iceland, and Ireland, with the most famous celebrations taking place in the Skansen Open-Air Museum in Stockholm, Sweden.

After enduring the long winter with 16 hours of darkness each day, Swedes set up a Maypole surrounded by birch leaves on Midsummer Day, then dance around it to welcome summer. The Midsummer Festival generally features three days of activities before the end of June, with the events on the first afternoon being the most important. The celebration ceremony is simple: in the afternoon, nearly 30 men and women dressed in traditional Swedish regional costumes, along with a band playing traditional instruments, enter together. Once the band takes their positions, they begin playing Swedish folk songs, while others decorate a cross-shaped frame with flowers. After it’s done, the men lift the flower pole with the frame, and the surrounding crowd cheers them on with shouts of “Oh~hey~.”

When the Maypole is finally erected, the crowd cheers, and everyone joins hands to dance in simple steps around the pole, following the lead singer’s calls and the music to celebrate joyfully all day. This season also marks the first harvest of potatoes, which are at their most delicious, so the most commonly enjoyed dish during the festival is boiled potatoes paired with various pickled or smoked herring cold cuts, served with Swedish cheese — a classic early-summer Swedish meal.

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