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Midsummer Day

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Midsummer Day

A Midsummer Day’s Dream in Sweden.
“Bring wine? To Midsummer? That is a funny joke,” said my Aunt Anna-Greta with a hearty peal of laughter and a knee slap. “Maybe you think you are in Italy!”
Eighty-two years old, with thick white hair and a face weathered by years of vacations in the Canary Islands, Anna-Greta Johnson is feisty, strong-willed, even more strongly opinionated and very Swedish. The matriarch of my extended family, Anna-Greta has never shied from putting someone in her place. And right then, standing in the middle of a breezy, green meadow in bucolic southern Sweden, that someone was me.

It was Midsummer in the pastoral southern province of Smaland — a holiday I celebrated for years as a child. But apparently I was a little rusty on tradition. The Midsummer party, usually held on the Friday after the summer solstice (this year’s will be on June 21, the day of the solstice itself), is a day — a very long day — that calls for a lot of singing, a smorgasbord of salty fish, bottomless glasses of beer, and aquavit, the local spirit distilled from potatoes, typically served chilled, drunk without the buffer of club soda and the reason my uncles always had to call a cab on Midsummer. In other words, this is the party of the year. And you definitely don’t bring wine.


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