June 25, 2003
Removeable feast
While midsummer may be on the B-list of holidays in Austria, it is probably the No. 1 celebration of the year for many if not most Swedes. Which is strange for me, since it is a holiday that didn’t exist, as far as I was concerned, until about four years ago.
Dancing around a leaf- and flower-covered pole, eating lots of cold herring and drinking lots of beer and schnapps while singing drinking ditties, wearing wreaths of flowers and leaves on your head, then playing silly children’s games and finally slow-dancing in the evening on a jetty (if you’re somewhere near the sea), are all part of the rituals of midsummer. As is moving between the inside and outside to avoid the cold and rainy weather.
It’s a holiday I can take or leave, mainly because I have no feelings about it, good or bad.
Unlike the Swedes, who seem to have a teeming host of conflicting hopes, longings, disappointments, happy memories and miscellaneous emotional baggage when it comes to midsummer. I suppose that’s what a holiday is at heart: a day full of expectations that are difficult, at best, to meet.
Strangely, holidays that once meant a lot to me when I lived in the States – Thanksgiving, for instance – have lost their meaning as well for me: I forget about them completely, since there’s little here to remind me.
I wonder if the new holidays in my life will ever replace the old holidays, and if they do, how long will it take? Will I ever have a visceral heart-shaking response to just the thought of midsummer?
My sister and I once argues about whether there were any "untainted" holidays left -- ones that hadn't been taken over by greeting card companies, or nationalism, or rampant consummerism, or the like. As we live in America, the answer for us was no.
So we made up our own.
Jersild Day is our little guerilla holiday in the middle of February. (You can read more about it at http://www.fiendishplot.com/jersild-day.htm, if you are so inclined.) I highly recommend creating your own holiday, that follows your own rules (or inherent lack of rules), just for the hell of it. It's most satisfying.
Posted by: Sarah at June 25, 2003 10:50 PMIt must take a very long time indeed. I have lived in Scandinavia for 14 years now and still feel not a flicker of feeling for Midsummer. Though, come to think of it, maybe that is progress. I used to pat myself on the back any time I managed to spend Midsummer abroad. Now I don't mind it as long as I don't have to participate in any Swedish organized jollity, viz. anything to do with the maypole or singing those silly songs.
As for bygone American holidays, Thanksgiving was nice but I usually forget all about it. I do miss Halloween as celebrated in San Francisco. The Fourth of July is now, more than anything else, the birthday of a close friend. I miss the fireworks.
A digression: the best fireworks ever were on Cape Cod a few years ago. In the town where my parents have their cottage, the always impressive fireworks display goes up from a floating platform just offshore.
That year, the igniters were drunk. Everything went swimmingly for the first twenty minutes, then we were treated to a spectacular finale the likes of which I have never seen anywhere.
I couldn't see what was happening from my perch a mile down the beach, but it turned out that someone had accidently set fire to the float. All the remaining ordinance went off in the space of a minute as the float burned. The workers swam for their lives.
We all cheered, the workers narrowly escaped and the town sued for...I don't know...malpractice or something. Peace reigned and all was well with the world.
Posted by: Opie at July 2, 2003 04:00 PM