Can you celebrate Friday the 13? How many people swim in the sea on Christmas Day? The most interesting traditions are the ones you make
up yourself in my opinion. Not many of the people I stayed with had their own
ones, but then it’s hard to define what a tradition is. Many people have
rituals they’re not even aware of themselves, but a ritual isn’t necessarily a
tradition, it might be a practise of sorts.
Some people mentioned watching a certain TV-programme
on a certain day or having a nice meal on a Friday night, but I’d call that a
habit rather than a tradition. However I found it hard to exclude Sunday roast…
I’ve tried to group the answers in order of popularity.
Traditions that People in England Celebrate
Christmas (“whether you want to or not”, “when getting
together for Christmas, Mum will get everyone to stand around toasting with
champagne, it’s a bit more formal than I’d like it to be”)
New Year (“dad shoots a cannon so loud it breaks
windows”)
The Summer and Winter Solstice, Beltane, pagan stuff,
celebrating the seasonal changes (“I used to go to Stonehenge as a pagan
holiday”, “we marked the solstice by setting off lanterns on the seafront”)
Having Sunday roast (“I’m very English in that way ,
to the point it annoys my partner, but I don’t want anything but Sunday roast
on a Sunday”)
Pancake day (“I’m not necessarily celebrating it on
Pancake day. Before it was associated with lent or Passover, a way of putting
all leftovers in a pancake, so not to be tempted to have leftover food when
fasting, but I don’t do it for that reason”)
Halloween
Easter
Burn’s night
Bonfire night
Valentine’s day
Mother’s
day
My birthday (“On my birthday I do what I want, I have
never worked on my birthday, I wouldn’t lift a finger”)
Going to the beach on the Summer Bank Holiday
Sea-swimming on Christmas Day
St Patrick’s day (said by a person with Irish blood)
My Saint’s day (a Polish tradition)
Traditions that People in Sweden Celebrate
Christmas (“we always write rhymes on the presents”,
“we put a fir-tree mat on the kitchen floor”, “we open one present at a time,
nobody is allowed to open anything before everyone has had a present”, ”it has
become a thing to outdo last year’s vegan smörgåsbord, to show the meat eaters
that I can make even better food than them”)
Lucia (a tradition with pagan and Christian origins,
people dress up in long white shirts, put candles in the hair and sing carols)
Midsummer (“A snaps and herring is a must for me, if I
was abroad I’d make sure to bring it with me”. Dancing around the maypole is
also obligatory!)
Cray-fish party (People eat a lot of crayfish at the
end of summer, wear silly hats, drink snaps, just an extention of Midsummer
really...)
New Year
Easter
Going to the grave on All Saint’s Eve (putting candles
on ancestors’ graves, hanging round graveyards, what people used to do before
Halloween hit Sweden)
Friday the 13 (” you can have bad luck without it
being a problem, if something bad happens you can think it’s Friday the 13,
it’s an excuse in a way”)
My wedding day. Panacotta on anniversaries and
Valentine’s Day
Camping on the beach in summer. Going to Öland once a
year with the family to do certain things. Sleeping on the porch when the
children were little to celebrate it was the summer holidays
My thoughts: I prefer the Solstice to Midsummer
Everyone I stayed with celebrated Christmas in one way
or another. Even though some were very reluctant, they often got invited to a
Christmas dinner of some sort. Even the people who came from different
religious backgrounds. I’ve blogged about the differences between English and
Swedish Christmas here.
Easter just means a couple of days off for most
people. Pancake day is much more popular in England than in Sweden.
The English people seemed more interested in pagan
rituals than Swedish people, but that’s not a very fair comment as Midsummer,
originally a pagan ritual, is almost as holy as Christmas for Swedish people.
And that a majority of the English people I stayed with live in Brighton also
explains the interest in celebrating the solstice.
When I grew up I never liked Midsummer because I found
it too stressful trying to find a party and people were likely to get too
loud and drunk. So after all my years in England I prefer celebrating
the Summer Solstice and to do something more spiritual like meditating even
though I often have a drink as well. Last year, as I was in Sweden, I made
my family celebrate the Winter Solstice by going out in the forest when it was
dark to drink glögg and do a scream.
Best & Worst
A tradition that comes from my family is that when
we’re gathered for different holidays and celebrations we always get
together at the end of each day and share our worst and best moment of the day.
This was a tradition that I brought to all the people I stayed with during the
Swenglish project.
Worst yesterday: finding my mum and dad and brother boring
for watching telly when I wanted to hang around and chat after dinner
Best yesterday: my brother making me laugh about a bag of
old music cassettes I’d asked him to sort out
This study is by no means scientific, the
answers are based on interviewing fifteen people in England and fifteen people
in Sweden, aged 22-59. Look out for the next question: What do the Swedes think
of England and what to the English think of Sweden?
The Stonehenge photo is my own, the Maypole and the pancake are taken from:
photo credit: <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/dahlstroms/7418337612/">Håkan Dahlström</a> via <a href="http://photopin.com">photopin</a> <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/">cc</a>
photo credit: <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/your_teacher/105944231/">Lynne Hand</a> via <a href="http://photopin.com">photopin</a> <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/">cc</a>
