Midsommar explained: the day the cities empty out

Your first Midsommar arrives with the shape of a festival in your head, and that is the wrong shape. Nothing is being staged for you to buy your way into. Midsommarafton is celebrated at somebody's house, in a garden, at a family's summer place, or on the grounds of a village association run by the people who live there. The guest list is a kitchen table and a phone. If nobody has put you on it, the day goes past very close to you and completely without you.

The other half of the surprise is what happens to the city. A lot of people leave, on the Thursday evening or on the Friday morning, heading for a house in the countryside, for relatives, or for whichever friend has the garden. The roads out are busy. What stays behind is quieter than an ordinary Friday: fewer people in the street, shops shut or closing early, restaurants on short hours. That is worth knowing on the Thursday rather than discovering at a locked door.

What happens once people arrive is domestic and slow. It starts in the early afternoon, around one, two or three o'clock, not in the evening. There is a pole to raise, food to carry outside, wreaths being made at a table, children running through all of it. Then it runs on for hours, and nothing tells you when it is over, because the sky does not: across most of the country a night in late June only ever gets as far as dusk, and north of the Arctic Circle the sun stays up.

Midsommarafton falls on the Friday between 19 and 25 June. There is no fixed date and there never has been, so a calendar is the only honest answer for any given year. The Saturday straight after it is Midsommardagen, Midsummer's Day. Almost everything described on this page, the pole, the meal, the dancing, happens on the Friday. The Saturday is the slow one.

The legal side sits the other way round from what most people assume. It is Midsommardagen, the Saturday, that appears on the list of Swedish public holidays. Midsommarafton, the Friday everyone actually celebrates, does not. In practice a great many workplaces shut or stop early on that Friday, and whether yours does comes down to your employer and to the kollektivavtal covering your job. Ask in May rather than on the day.

Opening hours are the second thing to check instead of assuming. Plenty of shops close early on Midsommarafton or stay closed altogether, and it varies by chain, by town and by year. The same applies to timetables, clinics and anything else you would normally deal with on a Friday afternoon. Look it up the day before and you avoid the one genuinely annoying part of the whole weekend.

The pole has two names and both are right. Midsommarstång is the plain one, majstång the older one, and which you hear depends mostly on where in the country you are standing. It is a wooden cross with two rings hanging from the arms, dressed in leaves and flowers picked that morning, and raising it is a job several people do together with ropes while somebody else says it is not straight. Turning up early enough to help dress it is the cheapest way to stop being a spectator.

Then people dance around it in a ring, holding hands. Not a folk group in costume, not a display put on for anybody: whoever is there. Adults do it. Adults who have been doing it since they were four do it, next to their own children, and they do it straight. The best known of the dances is Små grodorna, the little frogs, and it involves hopping. If you have decided in advance that this part is not for you, you will spend it standing alone at the edge of a field while everybody else hops, which is its own kind of conspicuous.

Nobody expects you to know the steps and nobody is watching you. Someone calls out what comes next, everyone is half a beat behind, and the same songs come round several times so the second attempt is already better. Rain changes nothing, and the joke made every single year is that it always rains at Midsommar. Wreaths get bound from whatever is growing nearby and worn by adults as readily as by children, and there is usually somebody at a table who will show you how.

Everything goes on the table at the same time and you serve yourself. There is no starter and no main course, and no plate is brought to you. Sill, pickled herring, is the fixed point of the meal. It turns up in several small jars or bowls, and those are different marinades of the same fish rather than different fish: senapssill is the mustard one, inlagd sill the vinegar and onion one, and most tables carry three or four sorts. You take a little of one, eat it, talk, then go back for another.

Around it: färskpotatis, the first new potatoes of the year, boiled and served warm with dill. Gräddfil, a soured cream, spooned over both the herring and the potatoes. Knäckebröd, the hard crispbread, with butter and cheese. Very often cured or smoked salmon, eggs, an omelette or a pie. It is a spread of small salty things rather than a dish, and it lasts a long time because the eating and the talking take turns.

Dessert is strawberries. Jordgubbar, in a bowl with cream, or on a cake with cream between the layers. The first Swedish strawberries of the year land right about now, which is most of the reason they matter as much as they do. If you have been asked to bring something and you have no idea what, this is the safe answer.

One sentence outranks all the vocabulary above. Tack för maten, thanks for the food, is said to whoever cooked, at the table, by everyone including the children. It is not decorative politeness that a foreigner can skip, and the pause where it belongs is audible if it goes missing. You say it again at the door on the way out.

Small glasses appear at some point during the meal, and a song is sung before anybody drinks. That is what a snapsvisa is: a short song performed at the table, sitting or standing, in front of a skål. Helan går is the best known by a distance and it is usually the one that starts things off, because everybody already knows it. Printed sheets get handed round at a lot of tables so that people can join in with the ones they do not know.

You can be completely inside all of this and drink nothing. The singing is the part everyone does. Skål is said with whatever is in your hand, and a glass of water rises exactly the same way. Ingen snaps för mig, tack is a whole sentence and it closes the subject without any discussion attached to it. Jag kör, I'm driving, is the other one, and it gets said several times at any table where people came by car.

Nobody is keeping score, and no reason is required. If you would rather not give one, do not. Nej tack on its own is a complete answer, and saying it a second time is not rude. The point of the evening is the table itself, not what is in the glasses.

You do not arrive empty-handed, and you ask rather than guess. Vad kan jag ta med? gets a literal answer here: dessert, bread, strawberries, something to drink. Take the answer at face value and bring that. Turning up with the same thing as three other guests bothers nobody. Bringing nothing is noticed, quietly, and never mentioned.

Shoes come off inside the door when it is somebody's home, and the rest of the doorway is the same set of codes that applies to any Swedish home. At a summer place with the party outside, the hallway will tell you what is expected: look at what is on the floor. Offering to help is a real offer and it often gets taken up, which is good news, since carrying chairs out and cutting bread is a much easier way to spend the first half hour than making conversation.

Invitations often come late, sometimes within the same week, and that is not an afterthought about you. Who is going where, whose house is free and how many fit in a car all take time to settle. So say early and plainly that you have nothing planned, and say it to more than one person. Invitations here tend to attach themselves to something already happening, and Midsommar is the clearest example of that in the whole calendar.

Leaving has a shape too. You say tack för maten again to whoever cooked, you carry something into the kitchen, and you say tack för idag at the door. The next time you see those people, which might be three weeks later, you say tack för senast. That last one is noticed far more by its absence than by its presence.

Spending your first Midsommar without an invitation is ordinary, and it is not a verdict on you. There is a public version of the day and it is genuinely open. Friluftsmuseer, open-air museums, raise their own pole with music and dancing, and the crowd at them is families rather than tourists. A hembygdsgård, the local heritage association's grounds, does a smaller version of the same thing in a lot of places, and many parks have a pole with times printed by the kommun. You turn up, you pay a small entry or nothing at all, and you are in the ring inside twenty minutes.

The rest of the day belongs to being outside. The right of public access and where exactly it stops is what makes a swim from a shore or a meal on unfenced land unremarkable here, and it is worth reading before you spread a blanket somewhere that turns out to be somebody's garden.

Then ask. In the first week of June, ask two colleagues what they are doing, and say what you are doing, which is nothing. This is a day when an answer of nothing at all turns into a seat at a table more often than at any other point in the year, and the Swedish for it is one sentence long.

Start with the unit on Swedish holidays and get the pole, the herring, the toast and tack för maten into your mouth before that Friday comes round. Ten minutes a day is enough to follow what is being said around a long table instead of watching it happen, and the months before an SFI place opens up are the cheapest practice hours you will ever buy.