Sweden - Vadstena

Midsummer in Vadstena

As a child brought up in Sweden you are brought up with the traditions of Swedish Midsummer, which contains of decorating a large wooden cross with two hoops with birch leaves and flowers. You raise that cross up when it’s decorated and you sing about frogs that have no ears and dance around it.

That sounds a bit crazy when you put it like that huh?
It’s really not. And it’s actually a national holiday in Sweden. It’s an occasion of family gatherings, where we eat our pickled herring and newly harvested potatoes. The children pick flowers to decorate the midsummer pole and make garlands and then the entire family gathers around for singing and dancing. In the old days, the midsummer pole was believed to be a part of an old fertility ritual to kind of give mother nature a push in the right direction so she would give a good harvest in the fall. Kind of a sweet tradition that I personally am happy that we still celebrate.

The midsummer night was believed to be a magical night for the younger people. If they picked a bouquet of nine different kinds of flowers and places it under their pillow, it was said that they would dream of their future love.

This did not really give you knowledge of the entire holiday, but that was not what I intended, I just got a bit sidetracked 😀 This post was supposed to be of our weekend in Vadstena, where we met up with some of our best friends that live across the country from us, to celebrate the Swedish midsummer … but since that really wasn’t what I wrote about, at all, I’ll just give you a bunch of images that was taken during our weekend instead.

Maybe you will have enjoyed my little story about our Swedish traditions, or maybe you’ll just look at the images anyways, even though it did not contain much of Vadstena. I’ll back you on that!
Hope you had an amazing Midsummer weekend!

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