Midsummer in New York

This year I discovered the Swedish midsummer festival in Battery Park. I had celebrated midsummer in Sweden every year up until the age of 10, when I became too old to miss the last two weeks of school. I did not have high expectations of this New York festival, thinking it would never measure up to the true Swedish ones. When I arrived, I knew immediately I was in the right place by all the blonde and blue-eyed people milling about. The adults sat squeezed together on the grass while rosy-cheeked children raced around in traditional blue-and-yellow dress. My friends and I were handed leafy, supple branches and some twine to make wreaths for ourselves. We were then given a bouquet of native Swedish wildflowers, in purple and yellow and white, to slip in among the leaves. After helping my friends, I made my way back to the main area, just in time to see the maypole being raised to loud cheers. The traditional midsummer music started and I was brought back to cool summer evenings in Sweden. The hostess was an American-born Swede whose loud voice and heavy accent ruined the soft lyrical words of the song she was trying to sing. However her voice was soon drowned out by everyone joining in as we got up to dance around the maypole. I joined hands with the strangers at my sides and skipped around, laughing as the song required us to jump around like frogs or collapse into an imaginary ditch. Despite the childish nature of these dances and songs they are something that everyone participates in, no matter what their age. There was a short break, during which I ate a typical Swedish lunch of waffles with jam and cream, and then everyone got together again for more dancing. Even after the festivities were over people hung around. I met a lot of young Swedes, just a few years older than me, who had recently moved to New York and had come to the festival hoping to allay their feelings of homesickness. I left the festival already looking to forward to the one next year.