Swedish Midsummer

The Swedish Midsummer's Eve is one of our big traditions, just as big as Christmas.
Most people celebrate the same way, with very few exceptions.

This is how we celebrated this year:
Meet up with good friends and theirs and ours kids at a summer house.

Start by eating a traditional Midsummer lunch:

• different kinds of pickled herring
• soused herring
• boiled eggs
• radish
• small early potatoes with their skin on, boiled with lots of dill
• sour cream with cut chives in it
• raw spiced/cold-smoked salmon
• fennel/anise spiced schnapps

Before every schnapps we sing a happy schnapps-song from a home made song book. In our case we always starts of by singing the Swedish anthem to bless the food, then it's down hill with songs from the gutter ;)

(many eat hot dishes like Janson's temptation, meatballs, prince sausages, mushroom omelette too. We always saves that for the next day).

After lunch it's time for stawberries with lightly whipped cream (and in my case - a ton of sugar. I find them so sour!).

Then we're off to dance around the Midsummer's pole/Maypole together with about 200-300 other Midsummer celebrating people of that area.

The pole is decorated with birch leaves and flowers and represents a HUGE penis to fertilize the soil in order to get a good crop. It's from the old days.

Then back to the summer house where we eat strawberry cake and drink coffee.

After it's crisps and candy time, and later we have barbecued meat served with potatoe salad.

I always force my <3 to have daisies in the hair on Midsummers Eve

Sometimes we have a quiz-walk or some other competition or game planned before lunch.