My midsummer didn’t turn out the way I planned. My husband got sick so we couldn’t go to the party I wrote about in my Happy Midsummer post. Instead, we stayed at my mother-in-law’s house, hung out with them, and my brother-in-law and his family, and had traditional Swedish midsummer foods as my poor husband mostly slept.
Anyway: I thought you might like to see some actual pictures from my Midsummer, not only the funny video clip from my midsummer post 🙂
Yours truly with the maypole. Since I couldn’t dance around it as tradition dictates, I danced with a mini maypole on my MIL’s lawn. The weather was great, which is unusual for Midsummer in Sweden. It always rains!
The most Midsummery of all Midsummer foods: different kinds of pickled herring. Personally, I’m not a fan (yuck!), so I eat the other stuff.
Here’s some of the other foods. From left: filled egg halves. Next to it is sour creme, the herring, and tomatoes. Then baked salmon fillets (I adored those!). To the right is gravlax, tzatziki and more tomatoes. This was only part of what we ate, and later, we threw som meat on the grill, too, and at the end of the day we were stuffed to the gills.
But this is the most important thing (for grownups at least): the snaps! Snaps is spiced alcohol that goes with the food. We drink them in tiny glasses and often sing accompanying songs. This is my favorite snaps: dill flavored. It goes with anything fish if you ask anyone else, but according to me it goes with everything!
After dinner, as we sat talking and enjoying each other’s company, enough raindrops fell to form a partial rainbow. Me and my parents-in-law stayed up late as the Midsummer night never grew entirely dark (this picture is taken at 9PM) and even though I missed the party I’d been looking forward to, I had a lovely time!
Nell Iris 