Categories
Diverse/Various

Swedish Midsummer in Tampa

The Swedish midsummer is always celebrated on Friday between the 19-25 of June. It’s been celebrated for many years and was connected with solstice but when Sweden became Christian it was celebrated on June 24 as a celebration of John the Baptist. Midsummer’s Eve is not a national holiday but they day after is just as New Year’s Eve, Christmas Eve and Holy Saturday are. This is one of the celebrations that everyone are celebrating.

Peter and his work threw a midsummer party and invited all the other nordic countries as well as some Americans. We started to celebrate at 1 pm and thought that maybe people wouldn’t stay very long as it was scorching hot outside and we were outside. Thankfully there were some breeze and you stopped sweating for about 10 seconds =)

The food we had was smoked salmon, cured salmon (gravlax) with sauce, pickled herring (mustard and onion), Jansson’s Temptation (Janssons Frestelse), potatoes, meatballs, eggs, sour cream and chives. Everyone said the food was delicious and we more or less finished all of it.

As it was so hot we skipped the dancing around the maypole but one of the Swedish kids really wanted to do it and when everyone but the Swedes were gone we did one dance. Then we almost died from the heat =)