The Swedish New Year often coincides with a bout of ice-cold weather. Temperatures, which tend to hover frustratingly around freezing point over Christmas, at least in the south, gradually drop, and by midnight you can see shivering Swedes, up to their knees in heavy snow, toasting one another in champagne and firing off rockets.
New year is spent with friends
It is quite an endearing sight, and it is also symptomatic of modern Sweden. In many respects, Swedes have begun to absorb the continental lifestyle, but somewhere along the way a collision always occurs. In this case, with the climate.
"Skål" for the New Year! Photo: Anna Molander/Mira
After celebrating Christmas with their immediate families, old or new, and with relatives and those that have married into the family, Swedes like to spend New Year’s Eve with their friends.
They don’t mind Christmas celebrations being an old-fashioned family affair, but New Year is nowadays supposed to be lavish, ostentatious, international and modern. In city market-halls and delicatessens, last-minute customers fight over the last lobsters and the last box of oysters.
New year's resolutions
At home in the kitchen, people reduce their sauces, caramelise their orange peel and lay the table with the finest dinnerware, tablecloths and candlesticks. They dress up in newly-bought clothes and pretend the icy wind howling outside the door is not there. Tights and high-heeled shoes, however, aren’t much fun in the grip of midwinter.
During dinner, you discuss both the past year and the year to come. You promise to become a much better person in future, and when the clocks strike midnight you make a New Year's resolution — in Sweden as elsewhere.
Many promise to stop smoking, or to lose weight, or to start exercising at a gym or make more money. As a rule, these promises are kept — for a few weeks, at least.
New Year's verse and fireworks
Like many other festive occasions in Sweden, the New Year has become increasingly dominated by the traditional offerings of the media.
Each year ends with a live broadcast from the Skansen open-air museum in Stockholm, where the bells chime and a New Year verse (interestingly enough by the English poet Tennyson) is solemnly declaimed to the nation. There’s something nice and secure about rounding off the year in front of the TV in your living room.
Fireworks at New Year's Eve. Photo: www.imagebank.sweden.se Micke Eliasson.
Many, however, prefer the cold night air. Those who are not lucky enough to live in a town flat with a view tend to seek out public places at midnight from where they can fire off rockets and sneak a look at other people’s firework displays.
You stand there, enveloped in your heavy winter coat, gazing open-mouthed as the horizon — whether high-rise buildings in silhouette or a sparse line of pine-trees — comes alight, flashing and crackling.
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Po Tidholm is a freelance journalist and a critic with the Stockholm daily, Dagens Nyheter. Po Tidholm wrote the main sections about how we celebrate in Sweden today.
Agneta Lilja is a lecturer in ethnology at Södertörn University College, Stockholm. Agneta Lilja wrote the sections about the history of Swedish traditions and festivities.
The authors alone are responsible for the opinions expressed on this web page.
Translation: Stephen Croall/Lingon
Copyright: 2004 Agneta Lilja, Po Tidholm and the Swedish Institute. This text is published by the Swedish Institute on www.sweden.se.