How to Celebrate Midsommar Like a Swede

The Day

The third Friday of June. The day the whole country stops. Schools have been out for a week. The offices empty by noon. The motorways fill with cars carrying kayaks, barbecue equipment, large quantities of beer, and several generations of the same family navigating to a cottage or a relative's garden or a village green where, for as long as anyone can remember, a pole is raised in the longest possible day and the strangest possible dancing begins.

Midsommar – Swedish Midsummer – is the closest thing Sweden has to a national religion. Christmas is important. New Year is festive. But Midsommar occupies a different category: it is the celebration of the thing Sweden does better than anywhere else on Earth, which is summer itself. Not summer in the sense of heat – Sweden rarely commits fully to heat – but summer in the sense of light. The late evening at nine that still looks like three in the afternoon. The fire-coloured sky at eleven. The sun that sets at eleven thirty and rises again at two thirty and never quite makes the sky fully dark in between.

To experience Midsommar as a visitor is to attend something that is not performing for you. It is too embedded, too genuinely felt. You are invited into it, awkwardly at first, and then less awkwardly, and then you're dancing around a maypole wearing a crown made of flowers you picked that morning and you've stopped wondering what it looks like from outside.

I first attended a proper Swedish Midsommar in Dalarna, on the lawn of a colleague's family cottage outside Leksand. I arrived not knowing any of the songs, not speaking Swedish, and carrying a bottle of wine that turned out to be an entirely inappropriate contribution (schnapps, it transpires, is the correct currency). By the end of the evening I had danced the frog dance four times, learned the first verse of Helan Går phonetically, eaten more herring than I had ever previously considered possible, and fallen asleep in a garden chair while the sky remained entirely, unreasonably light. I went back the following year. I have been back most years since.

What Midsommar Actually Is

Midsommar – Midsummer – is the celebration of the summer solstice, the longest day of the year. In Sweden it falls on the Friday and Saturday between June 19th and June 26th, making it a national holiday that the entire country takes very seriously indeed. Swedes who have moved to the cities come back to their home villages. Families who haven't seen each other since Christmas reunite. The country essentially shuts down for the weekend.

At its core, Midsommar is a pagan celebration of summer, fertility and the light. The Christian calendar absorbed and adapted it, as it did with so many northern European festivals, but the roots run much older and deeper than that. In the countryside particularly, it retains a quality that feels genuinely ancient.

The Maypole

The midsommarstång – the Midsommar pole – is a birch trunk stripped of bark, decorated with leaves, birch branches and wildflowers, with two rings hung crosswise from the top. It varies in size from village to village: some are monuments, twenty metres tall, raised with ropes and community coordination. Others are domestic-scale, assembled in a back garden by a family who've been doing it the same way for three generations.

The raising of the pole is a serious collective activity. It requires many hands, specific knowledge about the rigging and the counterweights, and a head for heights among the people at the top. In Dalarna, where the traditions are strongest, this ceremony can take the better part of an afternoon and is accompanied by music from fiddle players who have been learning the regional dance tunes since childhood.

Once the pole is up, the dancing begins. The dances are old – some trace back to the sixteenth century – and you don't need to know the steps. You watch until you understand the pattern, join a circle, and do your best. Nobody will judge you. The entire enterprise is too joyful for judgment.

The Flower Crown

On Midsommar morning, you pick wildflowers and weave them into a crown. This is not optional and there are no exceptions. The tradition is: seven different species for luck. Buttercups, cornflowers, clover, cow parsley, red campion, ox-eye daisies and whatever the seventh thing is that you find at the edge of the field where everyone is picking. You make the crown with stems and wire or just stems if you're skilled; you wear it for the rest of the day.

There is something in wearing a flower crown that overrides adult self-consciousness faster than you'd expect. By noon, everyone is wearing one. The most formally dressed people you'll see all year are wearing flower crowns. The effect is immediate and collective: something goes slightly sideways in the usual relationship between how you look and how you feel, and Midsommar starts to work its strange chemistry.

What You Will Eat (Non-Negotiable)

The Midsommar table is one of the most specific and non-negotiable things in Swedish culture. It contains: new potatoes boiled with dill (the first potatoes of the season, small and waxy and sweet, eaten with sour cream and chives). Pickled herring in at least two preparations – the classic mustard herring (senapsill) and the onion herring (lökill) as a minimum, with more varieties if the host is serious. Swedish crispbread. Butter. And strawberries with cream – Swedish June strawberries, small, intensely flavoured, the variety called Senga Sengana or similar small-fruit cultivar, served simply with whipped cream or cream poured from a jug.

This menu has been essentially unchanged for at least a hundred years. There may be additions – a piece of salmon, some cheese, a green salad – but the core is immovable. You eat it outdoors if at all possible, at a long table, in the long evening light, with snaps glasses for the aquavit and the required songs.

Aquavit, Songs and the Art of the Toast

Aquavit – snaps – is drunk at Midsommar in small glasses, with songs. The songs are snapsvisor: drinking songs that are sometimes bawdy, sometimes elegiac, sometimes entirely nonsensical, and always sung in unison by everyone at the table including people who cannot sing. You are expected to participate. You learn the refrains quickly: they are designed to be learnable quickly. The most famous is Helan Går, sung before the first snaps is drunk, its meaning roughly "all of it goes" and its function roughly to establish that what follows will be convivial and somewhat unguarded.

Non-drinkers participate in everything except the actual snaps; nobody cares about this and you will not be pressed. The music and the words and the collective act of singing at a table in the evening are the point, not the alcohol specifically.

The Frog Dance

Små grodorna – "The Little Frogs" – is the song. You hop around the maypole in a circle with your hands on your hips, crouching and jumping at the appropriate moments in the lyrics. The song is about frogs who have no ears and no tails, which makes them wonderful and which also makes absolutely no sense as the basis for a national festival tradition. But there it is, and the fact that it makes no sense is entirely part of the charm.

Other dances – including the very Swedish polska and various other folk dances – continue throughout the afternoon and evening. You do not need to know the steps. Standing nearby smiling and clapping works perfectly well until someone grabs your hand and pulls you in, which will happen.

Where to Go

Dalarna is the heartland of Swedish Midsommar tradition. The area around Lake Siljan – and particularly the village of Rättvik, where a massive community celebration takes place at the village green overlooking the lake – is the most traditional and spectacular. The fiddle tradition in Dalarna is unbroken and still very much alive; the music at a Dalarna Midsommar is genuinely moving.

Skansen open-air museum in Stockholm is the obvious option for visitors without local connections. It hosts a large public celebration with professional folk musicians and dancers, attended by thousands of people, and is excellent as an introduction to the traditions. It is, however, slightly more performance and slightly less family gathering than what you'd experience in someone's garden in Dalarna.

The best Midsommar experience is always the one you're invited to by Swedish people who are celebrating for themselves rather than for an audience. If you have any Swedish contacts, asking to join their Midsommar is an invitation worth extending. In almost every case you will be welcomed.

Practical Tips for Visitors

Midsommar weekend is one of the busiest travel periods in Sweden. Book accommodation months in advance – particularly in Dalarna and the archipelago, where demand enormously exceeds supply. Trains and ferries fill up fast. The reward for advance planning is access to one of the most joyful and genuinely Swedish experiences you can have.

If you're invited to a private family celebration, accept without hesitation. Swedes are generally welcoming to curious visitors who show genuine interest in their traditions. Bring flowers for the host, offer to help with preparation, and be prepared to dance. You will be welcomed.

Midsommar Checklist: What to Prepare

Mistakes Tourists Make at Midsommar

Frequently Asked Questions: Midsommar in Sweden