January/February 2013
While pushing my daughter in the swing at our local playground here in Williamsburg, Brooklyn recently, I overheard a conversation between two other parents. “We’re going to Norway to see the northern lights over Christmas, to celebrate my dad’s 70th birthday,” one parent said to another. I realised how exotic northern lights must be to them – something to travel across half the world to see, apparently – and felt a bit ashamed that I have never taken any effort to see it myself, although I have lived an awful lot closer to it than those guys for the major part of my life.
It made me think of another instance, when two American friends came to visit me and my boyfriend in Stockholm in butt-cold January. One of the first days they came back after a walk around a pitch dark Södermalm and their eyes were beaming. “Wow, you think the set designers of the Harry Potter films are geniuses, but they must have stolen everything from here!” In particular, they had been entranced by a walk across the churchyard of Katarina Kyrka, where lit candles were placed next to the gravestones, glowing against the white snow. It sounded wonderful – and it was. But most Stockholmers around them were probably too busy bitching about the cold weather to see it.
The usual recommendation is to visit Stockholm in the summer, but I say that winter is what we do best. It’s like all those English names of Swedish restaurants and cafés that litter the Stockholm streets – Urban Deli, Sandy’s, Wayne’s Coffee, Götgatan Stories, to name but a few. Why try to pretend we’re in New York or London when we’re not?
Why be a lesser copy of something that already exists somewhere else? It reeks of low self-confidence. No, give me Swedish names like Djuret (The Animal), Tjoget (The Score), Kåken (The Slammer), Landet (The Countryside) och Trädgården (The Garden), all great names of great Stockholm restaurants. And by the same token, let’s face it: our summers are nothing to write home about. Yes, it’s beautiful when it’s warm and sunny, but the problem is that it very seldom is. The Swedish summer is unreliable. The winter is not. The winter will be long, dark and cold. The winter is who we are, and our winter is what makes our country unique. We would be better off embracing it, instead of hating it and live for the summer.
I’m coming home for Christmas and I’m doing it thoroughly. I’ll be landing Dec 1st so I’m here for all the Sunday afternoon parties with mulled wine and home baking that Swedes host to celebrate the Christmas countdown known as advent. I won’t miss Lucia on December 13, when I’m going to rise brutally early to see my niece and nephew sing angelic songs in a church together with all their school mates and eat the saffron buns called lussekatter. I’ll be celebrating Christmas Eve in the archipelago, in a hundred-year old wooden house with old-fashioned tiled stoves and creaky floors. Hopefully there will be snow and ice, most certainly it will be cold and dark. And I’m going to love every second.
Because, this, my friends, is Sweden.
