Swedish Midsummer: Flowers, Feasting, and the Longest Day of the Year

There are two days that divide the Swedish year, and only one of them falls in winter. Christmas may be the cosier of the pair, but ask a Swede which celebration truly belongs to them — heart, soul, and bare feet in the grass — and the answer is Midsummer. Midsommar is the long, light, flower-crowned high point of the Scandinavian year, when the whole country seems to close its laptops, leave the cities behind, and head for the countryside to dance.

The longest day

Midsummer is, at its root, a celebration of light. Sweden sits so far north that around the summer solstice the sun barely sets at all: in Stockholm the June nights dwindle to a few hours of pale blue dusk, and in the far north, above the Arctic Circle, the sun never dips below the horizon. After the long, dark grip of the Nordic winter, that flood of daylight is something to be celebrated with the whole body.

The festival is far older than any church calendar. Its bonfires and greenery reach back to pre-Christian solstice rites marking the turning of the year and the fertility of the land. Later it was attached to the feast of St John the Baptist — Johannes Döparen — but in Sweden today Midsummer is gloriously secular: a celebration of nature, of summer, and above all of being together.

Officially the date floats. Midsummer's Eve (midsommarafton) — the day that really matters — always falls on the Friday between 19 and 25 June, with Midsummer's Day on the Saturday that follows. For many Swedes it also marks the unofficial start of the long summer holiday, when the cities empty out and the sommarstuga — the little red summer cottage — fills with family.

Raising the maypole

At the centre of the day, quite literally, stands the maypole: the midsommarstång (or majstång). Despite the name it has nothing to do with the month of May — maja is an old word meaning to dress or cover with greenery, and that is exactly what happens. The tall wooden cross, usually with two rings hanging from its arms, is wound with birch leaves and wildflowers until it is more garden than pole, then hoisted upright in a meadow or on a village green while everyone gathers round.

Once it is standing, the dancing begins — and it is cheerfully, deliberately silly. The most famous of all is Små grodorna, "The Little Frogs," in which grown adults and delighted children hop in a ring around the pole, hands at their ears and then their tails, pretending to be frogs that have no ears and no tails. No one is too dignified to join in, and that, in a way, is the whole point.

Flowers in the hair

The other unmistakable image of Midsummer is the flower crown, the midsommarkrans. Worn by children and grandparents alike and woven from whatever the meadow offers — daisies, buttercups, clover, lupins — it turns an ordinary gathering into something out of a Carl Larsson painting.

The flowers carry a thread of old magic, too. Tradition says that on Midsummer's Eve a young woman should pick seven different kinds of wildflower in silence, climbing over seven fences or stiles to gather them, and place them beneath her pillow that night. If she does, she will dream of the person she is to marry. Midsummer, falling at the very height of summer's fertility, has always been quietly bound up with love and courtship.

The feast

Then there is the food — and here the table is wonderfully predictable, because tradition is exactly the point. Pride of place goes to pickled herring (sill), offered in several styles, alongside boil-in-the-skin new potatoes (färskpotatis) dusted with fresh dill, with sour cream and chopped chives close at hand. There will be gravad lax, crisp knäckebröd, a wedge of mature cheese, and the first sweet strawberries of the season.

To drink: cold beer and small glasses of ice-cold snaps (aquavit). And snaps in Sweden is never taken in silence — each round is launched with a snapsvisa, a short and lusty drinking song, the most beloved of which is Helan går. Sing the verse, tip back the glass, and reach again for the herring.

Dessert is almost always strawberries — jordgubbar — heaped with cream, or layered into a jordgubbstårta, the cream-and-berry sponge cake that tastes like the Swedish summer itself. And the weather? Swedes will tell you, with a rueful smile, that it very often rains on Midsummer. They dance anyway.

The heart of the Swedish summer

What makes Midsummer so beloved is not really the herring or the maypole or even the endless light. It is the gathering: generations together in a green meadow, flowers in their hair, marking the brief and brilliant peak of the northern year before it begins, almost imperceptibly, to tilt back toward the dark.

At A Swedish Affair, that spirit — of light, of a well-set table, of togetherness — is exactly what we hope to carry out into the world. Whether you are dressing a Midsummer table of your own or simply bringing a little Scandinavian summer into your home, may your longest day be bright, your herring plentiful, and your flower crown only slightly wilted by the rain. Glad midsommar!