Juhannus, or Midsummer, is the Finnish holiday. Forget Christmas. Midsummer has it beat in importance and scope in Finland.
Having said that, I have never actually celebrated a proper midsummer.
This is because Finns celebrate it by loading up their cars and heading out to their mökki (cottage). There, they grill sausages, drink, sauna, swim in the lake (hopefully the mökki is by a lake, otherwise what is the point?) and stay up really late, even the kids. There is no bedtime for Finnish kids on Juhannus. It’s the longest day of the year, and parents are going to feel every second. But that’s okay, because this is a Finnish holiday, so drinking alcohol is part of the celebration. The biggest risk on Juhannus is getting drunk, going for a swim or boat ride on the nearby lake and drowning. This happens to someone on midsummer every year, so it’s basically tradition at this point.
Swedish-speaking Finns celebrate Juhannus by erecting midsummer poles, or midsommarstång.
In other areas Finns light bonfires, but that is also not a thing everywhere with some areas saving the big bonfires for the last weekend they spend at their summer cottages before shutting them down for the fall.
We didn’t have a mökki in Finland, and my inlaws decided their mökki was too run down to house our large family, plus their other kids’ families. Since they’d been celebrating Juhannus there for years, we stayed in the city.
Finnish cities are almost eerily quiet on Juhannus. The holiday is officially set to be a Saturday falling between June 20 and June 26, instead of the actual summer solstice. Celebrations, however, begin already in Friday as the city empties out. We celebrated by buying a bunch of berries (strawberry season in Finland is the best), eating sausages and having a picnic at the nearby park with other friends who were also stuck in the city.
For the first three years we didn’t let the kids stay up as late as they wanted. For the first year it was because we didn’t know that was a thing. The second and third years it was because the kids didn’t know that was a thing. The fourth year they found out and we were obliged to let them celebrate it properly, except for the youngest.
Daylight at 11pm will never stop being weird to me, but there is something magical about the quiet brightness of the longest day of the year, when everyone else has gone to the countryside. It feels like being the last person left after an apocalypse.
With that, I wish everyone a very happy midsummer with sauna, swimming, sausages and a moderate amount of alcohol!