When: June 24
Midsummer (Midsommar) is one of the most important celebrations in Scandinavian culture — a summer solstice celebration that predates Christianity and has specific food traditions centered on new potatoes, herring, strawberries, and aquavit. It's one of the few food-cultural events where the season is the entire point.
Midsummer is the longest day of the year in Scandinavia — and the food traditions built around it are among the most specific and seasonal in European culture.
On Midsommarafton — Midsummer Eve — Sweden effectively shuts down. Streets empty. Families travel to country houses. People who don't have country houses go to someone else's. The celebration begins in the afternoon with the raising of the maypole (midsommarstång), decorated with birch branches and wildflowers, and continues through an evening that barely gets dark. This is the longest day of the year in Scandinavia, and the light at midnight is still pale. The celebration is built around that light. Midsummer in Scandinavia predates Christianity by at least a thousand years. It was a solar festival marking the year's peak and the beginning of the sun's retreat — and like many pre-Christian European festivals, it was eventually incorporated into the Christian calendar as the feast of St. John the Baptist (June 24). In most countries that worked. In Scandinavia, the older celebration was simply too important to be subsumed, and the Christian overlay thinned out over centuries. Sweden's...