It was very cold – even by Swedish standards. Water pipes froze, pumps froze, noses froze, wolves showed up well south of Stockholm, and people talked about a genuine Season of the Wolf.

After that, it got warmer. A lot warmer. Record-breakingly warm. By the year’s end, Swedes were not discussing anything but the greenhouse effect. Yet it was as if the chilly start to the year had also made us believe in the myth that we live in an unusually frozen country.

Otherwise Swedes are eager to correct prejudices about their country: no, polar bears do not walk the streets of Stockholm; no, group sex with strangers is unusual; and no, the reason why there are only nine million of us is not that we are constantly committing suicide.

Paradoxically, 2006 ended up being the year when even to us Swedes, Sweden became cold in mental terms.

“We live in ice houses”
I realized this in Cape Town, 10,370 kilometers (6,445 miles) due south of Stockholm. The last time I visited South Africa, people were awaiting the first Swedish tourist charter flight. A nude beach has just been laid out, because the vacation habits of Swedes were considered well-known: swimming in the nude, playing ping pong in the nude and wrestling with moose in the nude.


Yes, the Icehotel in Jukkasjärvi, Sweden, is a popular tourist destination, but no, this does not mean that all Swedes live in ice houses. Photo: Johan Ylitalo /  www.imagebank.sweden.se

But this year, all the South Africans I met, from wine growers to jazz musicians, talked instead about the Ice Hotel in Jukkasjärvi, Sweden. Suddenly I, too, ran out of energy to answer back with arguments like “ice houses in Sweden are as common as pizza houses in Italy.” Instead I heard myself saying: “Of course. We live in ice houses, drink vodka from ice glasses, play music on ice violins and sleep on ice beds on the skins of animals we shot with our ice bows and arrows and slaughtered with our ice knives.” 

Win some, lose some
The sporting year was also dominated by cold, including a men’s Olympic gold medal in ice hockey and a women’s silver medal. Granted, US talk show host David Letterman made fun of what he considered weird winter sports like biathlon, in which Sweden won some medals. To Letterman, skiing and shooting were as bizarre a combination as swimming and strangling. That opinion may be acceptable in New York City, but not in a snowy Swedish yard where a wolf has just walked past. 

Sweden’s soccer World Cup effort ended disappointingly, however. Other setbacks included coming in fourth place in a “best healthcare in Europe” list; the fact that Finland, not we, won the Eurovision Song Contest; and that Stockholm has moved below such places as Shanghai (China), Kiev (Ukraine) and São Paulo (Brazil) to only being the world's 36th most expensive city. Some Swedes took this as a sign of our mounting poverty.

But worst of all was ending up in seventh place in the list of the world’s happiest countries, topped by our neighbor and arch-rival Denmark. But Danes drink more beer than Swedes, which in this context should be classified as doping.

Feathers in the cap
We did achieve some top rankings, though. Sweden was named the world leader in globalization, the UN ranked us as one of the five best countries to live in, vacationing UK newspaper readers named us their favorite European destination and Sweden was rated as the country that does the most to combat the greenhouse effect (we have lots of practice in creating icy cold).

Perhaps the year’s most prestigious title also went to Sweden: the world’s most democratic country. You can hardly win anything fancier.

With that feather in our cap, we can even swallow such peculiarities as the fact that 80 percent of the Swedish people trust Ikea, but only 35 percent trust the Parliament. But of course it's easier to immediately trust someone who says “This is a chair; you can sit in it” than someone who solemnly promises that “Sweden will be oil-free in 15 years.” 

Old myths, new government
After a record-hot summer – resulting in a severe shortage of ice cream – it was as if Sweden put all its energy into really cultivating the myth that it’s a frozen country. Björn Borg, tennis legend turned underwear king, ran full-page ads with pictures of half-naked blondes marching with brooms among icebergs and polar bears.

After an eternity, the Swedish people voted the Social Democrats out of office. The new non-socialist alliance government is headed by Moderate Party leader Fredrik Reinfeldt, whose surname can be translated as “reindeer field.”

Finally we gave the Nobel Prize in literature to the Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk. We thus began the year with a wolf on an icy surface and ended it by rewarding a writer who made his breakthrough here with the novel Snow.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Johan Tell is a travel journalist and writer. His works include a guide to Stockholm and a book on myths and truths about Sweden:  Lagom – myter och sanningar om det vi kallar svenskt.

The author alone is responsible for the opinions expressed in this article.

Classification: A175EN

© Photo 1: Jussi Nukari and Magnus Jönsson / Scanpix
© Photo 2: Johan Ylitalo /  www.imagebank.sweden.se
© Photo 3: Jonas Ekströmer / Scanpix