Today is the well celebrated Midsummer Festival in Finland. Traditionally it would be a very rainy day, but looking at the gorgeous pictures people are posting it seems to be a beautiful sunny day for the people in south Finland. Summer is the time of year that I miss Finland the most, the land of a thousand lakes and the midnight sun. I can just about see the black and white birch trees swaying as the gentle wind follows its path along the lake shores. My best summer in Finland by far was the one after our one and half years of living in China, everything seemed greener and fresher than ever before.
One of the traditions of Midsummer is to have a sauna, a true Finnish sauna 🙂 And part of that sauna experience is to pull out your dried up vihta/birch whisk or run to the yard and build up a new one from the birch branches. A vihta consists of about 10-15 branches with a good amount of leaves on them, they are tied tightly together and hung e.g. on the sauna wall to dry. It’s the longest day of the year, the sun does not set, you have enjoyed your kokko, bonfire, had a few fire roasted sausages and you are ready for your sauna with a cold beer in hand. Grab that vihta with you! Listen to the water sizzle on the hot stones and feel the heat (175-195 degrees Fahrenheit) rise and fill the air around you. Dunk the vihta in the bucket of warm water and get ready… start slapping yourself with the branches full of hot leaves. The smell is incredible! The heat opens up your pores and prepares your skin for a deep cleanse, while the leaves of the vihta invigorate and rejuvenate the skin that they touch. OK, I officially miss Finland now.
Finnish people used to believe that spirits housed sauna’s, so part of the sauna experience used to be the appeasing of those spirits. Sauna was also used as a place for birthing. There are a number of folk poem’s related to sauna such as this one:
Terve löyly,terve lämmin,
terve kiehuva kivonen,puun löyly,
häkärän lämmin,kiven kiukku-hengelisen!
Lähe nyt pois jo hiien hönkä,himmene paha häkärä,syömästä,
kaluamasta,tämän ihmisen ihosta,tämän pojan polven päästä!
I don’t have a sauna, allthough the heat and humidity of Georgia sometimes resemble it a bit, no not really 🙂 But our porch over hang and these drying oregano branches remind me of a sauna so I have to add this photo to this post 🙂
A GREEN LEAF 