This is an old picture that I borrowed from the internet until I can take a picture my self. The midsummer pole. It might look like a christian cross, but it´s anything but. If you think as durty as You can You can see what it is :-) It´s a gigantic phallos :-) Midsummer has always been a pagan fertility celebration and for some reason the christian church never got rid of it. So every year people dance around the pole singing about the little frogs that are so funny to see :-)

Midsummer has always been an important holiday in Sweden. We celabrated it long befor christianity arrived here. People thought that plants had magical powers on midsummer nights and it was also the night fertility was highest. When the christians came they tried to make it a holiday to remember John the Baptists birth, but that was really never accepted here in Sweden.



I promised to show a picture of the swedish flag. Not the best picture but I took it from my car driving. It´s blue as the sky with a cross yellow as the sun.

This is how far I came with digging away the lawn on the pond spot. After that it has rained all the time more or less.

So every midsummer eve morning people gather to make the Midsummer pole. Usually it´s rather high and made like a big cross. The pole is dressed with branches with leafs and flowers. On the end of the horizontal pole hangs two flower wreaths. Some may think that this is a christian cross, but oh how wrong they are :-)

A yellow foxglove. We call it Thimble flower.

Helenium hoopsei.

Midsummer is after Christmas our biggest holiday. First we make the pole and after that music is played and we´re dancing around the pole for a long, long time. Mostly we do it for the children nowdays and thinking of what the pole really stands for it´s a bit fun for out of country visitors to se us all dansing and singing around the midsummer pole :-) :-)

Cuckoos wort.

The first picture taken with my new mobile phone. The camera is quite good.

After that we start to eat! The most important food on midsummer is new small potatoes and pickled harring in all its varieties. It seemes we have pickled harring on every holiday dinner :-) For us not to happy about pickled harring there is ofcourse a lot of other things to eat. Meatballs, a swedish sausage called Prince sausage, salmon, chicken and lots of other things. Later on the day families play games like crocket or boule.

Dogrose bud.

Now the Dogroses has started to flower in my garden.

Unfortunally hevy drinking is common too. This is one of the worst nights for the police to work on. Tomorrow some people will be hit by a drunk driver and some of them will die. But the worst day in traffic is actully Thursday (yesterday) and on Sunday. Every one wants to get to their summer houses as fastas possible on Thursday (most of us don´t work on Thursday and Friday even if they aren´t holidays) and on Sunday they are tired from the celebration when they drive home again.

One of the many geraniums that grows in my garden.

This moth was sitting on my Brugmansia, I think You call it Angels trumpet like we do (the brugmansia I mean). This is taken by my camera.

I´m not celebraiting midsummer because I think it´s sad that it all turns towards winter again. I know it´s stupid to think like that, summer has just begun and the warmest period (if lucky anyway) is till to come. But I can´t help it. In a day or two I´ve forgotten about it and things are back to normal again :-)
Have a great day now!

This is the same moth but the picture is taken with my mobile phone. Wit a few adjustments I think it´ll be impossible to se any differens between the two cameras, at least on close ups like this.