Month: June 2025

The pagan origins of Sweden’s Midsummer celebrations

Posted on by Neil Shipley's watching the Swedes

The long Midsummer weekend is drawing to a close in Sweden. Known as “Midsommar”, it is one of the most significant and widely celebrated holidays in the country. Its history blends ancient pagan traditions with later Christian influences and remains a vital part of Swedish cultural identity.

The origins of Midsummer in Sweden are rooted in pre-Christian solstice celebrations. Ancient peoples marked the summer solstice, the longest day of the year, with rituals to honour nature, fertility, and the sun. These rituals often involved dancing, feasting, and the lighting of bonfires, believed to ward off evil spirits and ensure a good harvest.

Flowers and greenery played an important role, symbolising fertility and the power of nature at its peak. It was also a time associated with magic and love, when people believed that plants had healing powers and that dreams could foretell the future—especially for young women seeking to glimpse their future husbands.

With the spread of Christianity in Scandinavia during the early Middle Ages, many pagan customs were adapted into the Christian calendar. The Church linked Midsummer celebrations to the feast of St John the Baptist, celebrated on 24 June. As a result, Swedish Midsummer traditionally falls around this date, although in modern times it is observed on the Friday between 19 and 25 June, followed by Midsummer Day on the Saturday.

Despite this Christian connection, the festival retained much of its pagan character, particularly the focus on nature and fertility, rather than religious observance.

Today, Midsummer remains the major secular celebration in Sweden. It marks the unofficial start of the summer holidays, when many Swedes leave cities for the countryside or their summer cottages (sommarstugor).

The festival is a strong symbol of national identity, with its emphasis on community, connection to nature, and timeless traditions. It is a day when Swedes of all ages participate in shared customs that span generations.

Swedish Midsummer – food and drink

Posted on by Neil Shipley's watching the Swedes

Swedish Midsummer celebrates abundance and as such, a great deal of food and drink is consumed. After guests arrive and have their first drink(s), the wreaths start to get made, the potatoes peeled, strawberries topped and the maypole gets decorated with flowers and leaves. Once erected, and danced around, it’s time for lunch.

As far as drinking goes, ‘nubbe’, or snaps, is a common tipple accompanied by traditional drinking songs and washed down with beer. A popular brand of snaps is OP Anderson which is flavored with aniseed and fennel and is 40% proof. The drink has been around for 130 years on the market – the first snaps being sold in 1891! Another popular nubbe , the Danish Jubileums, is 40% proof and tastes of dill, coriander and bitter orange. There are also small-sized bottles than can be bought in fun packages that have a mixture of flavorings.

When it comes to the food, in the evening it has become popular in recent years to have a barbecue. But it is at lunch time when the traditional food is consumed, with a Midsummer smorgasbord (buffet).

On this buffet, it is common to find various types of pickled herring, soused herring, boiled new potatoes, gravlax with ‘hovmästare’ sauce, smoked salmon, Västerbotten cheese pie, crisp bread and mature cheese, chopped herbs, red onion, egg halves, ‘silltårta’ (herring cake), various sauces and mixes, fresh and smoked shrimps, fish roe.

As you can imagine, this food is very rich and fatty, which is why it is usually eaten together with the alcoholic snaps.

For dessert, the only thing to eat are Swedish strawberries and cream or a home-made strawberry cake. Anything else would be sacrilege. Some families also eat rhubarb pie.

After lunch, bolstered by the snaps, it’s usually time for garden games, a walk in the woods or a quick dip in the not-quite-yet-warm-enough lake or sea.

If the party lasts really late into the night, then there can also be a ‘vickning’. This is a ‘midnight meal’ designed to sober up drunk guests. It often includes some leftovers from the day, or can also be a very welcome hot dog. 🌭

How Swedish students celebrate!

Posted on by Neil Shipley's watching the Swedes


This time of the year, a common sight and sound on the streets of Sweden is 19-year old students on trucks.

Dressed in traditional white caps, and often bolstered with alcohol, the students jump up and down to the booming music from loud speakers concealed in the vehicle. They scream, sing, shout and spray beer on each other and sometimes unsuspecting pedestrians.

Many of them have banners hanging on the side of the trucks. Usually these just contain information about their school and class, but sometimes they’re personal, political or funny.

These youngsters are celebrating the end of their school career. They have just graduated from Sixth Form College/High School. 

It’s not all fun and games though. Every year the media reports accidents and injuries, which is not entirely unexpected considering the mad energy with which the students jump and scream. And trucks have been banned from certain roads and areas in the towns. 

In Sweden, doing ‘studenten’, as it’s called in Swedish, is a major rite of passage into adult life. The youngsters finish their last day at school, come running out of the building to be greeted by waiting parents and families holding placards with a childhood photo on.

The students then climb aboard their trucks for their lap of honour. After that they go around to each other’s homes where each family usually arranges a reception to honour the newly-graduated student. 

It is a very common sight on the streets of Sweden this time of the year and a refreshing reminder of the hopefulness of youth. 

Swedish caviar – but not as you know it

Posted on by Neil Shipley's watching the Swedes

kalleskaviarWhen you hear the word ‘caviar’, you probably get an instant picture in your head – a picture of jewelled fish eggs, vodka, champagne, Russia and luxuriousness.

Until you hear about Swedish caviar – or more specifically a popular Swedish fishy foodstuff called ‘Kalle’s kaviar’. The New York Times referred to it as ‘challenging the global gag reflex’.

Kalle’s caviar comes in a tube, emblazened with the image of a blue-eyed, blonde-haired boy called Kalle. It hit the Swedish market in 1954, and has remained an extremely popular food since then. The tube contains smoked, sugar-salted cod and sik roe. It also contains lots of sugar, lots of salt, potato flakes and tomato purée. To eat it, one simply squeezes it from the tube, like toothpaste, onto an open sandwich usually containing boiled eggs. Kalle’s caviar is a fishy staple in the Swedish diet. It has a very pungent, extremely salty fishy taste.

It seems to be a divider amongst people. Some people love it, some people despise it. I would politely say that it’s an acquired taste. It certainly is a taste that has took me twenty years to acquire. When I first tasted it, I remember balking and questioning if it was even fit for human consumption. But now, I will happily squeeze the fishy stuff onto my boiled egg at breakfast time.

Sure, it’s caviar. But not as you know it.

 

Swedish National Day – a new king, an old king, a new constitution and 500 years of independence.

Posted on by Neil Shipley's watching the Swedes

On 6 June 1523, Gustav Vasa was crowned King of Sweden. He was one of the few survivors of the Stockholm Bloodbath, in which his father and 80 other nobles were murdered, Game of Thrones style.

He ruled the country until 1560. During his reign, he released Sweden from the Kalmar Union consisting of Sweden, Denmark and Norway. He also turned Sweden from a catholic country into a Protestant one, with the monarch and not the pope as head of the church.

6 June is another significant day in Swedish history – on 6 June 1809 the country signed a new constitution. This lay the foundation for Sweden’s current status as an independent democracy and was in place until 1974.

The constitution returned political power to the parliament after King Gustav IV Adolph was deposed in a military coup in 1809. He was the last Swedish monarch to rule over Finland. After him, the crown passed not to his children but to his uncle, Charles XIII. Charles had no legitimate heir, which set into motion the quest for a successor. This was found the following year in the person of Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte, the first monarch of the present royal family.

For these two reasons, Sweden celebrates its National Day today – June 6th. It was declared in 1983, and was first celebrated as a public holiday in 2005.

The day is celebrated with various events up and down the country.