Monthly Meetings/Events
With events canceled until it is safe to get together again,I am instead filling this page with past events...a trip down memory lane.
Our First Valborg
June is our usual Kubb Night
Kubb is a traditional outdoor Swedish game that is great fun for families, children or people who take the game more seriously. These rules are "friendly" rules and don't have every tiny caveat that can be imagined. However, they should cover almost all situations that crop up during normal games.
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Swedish Meatball Team
The awesome Swedish Meatball team meets annually just before Midsommar to make meatballs for the Midsommarfest. Besides making meatballs, all participants enjoy our famous meatball lunch.
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Meatballs are as quintessentially Swedish as it gets. In their most traditional form Swedish meatballs (köttbullar) are made of ground pork and beef, cream, bread crumbs, egg and onion, and are served with a light gravy, new potatoes and lingonberry jam.
Of course with every important team there are awards and 2019 was the year to recognize some of our excellent team members. Click on PDF to see our awards.
The Story of Our Midsommar Pole - Midsommarstang
2011 - 2019
For the first several years we cut a large aspen or spruce or birch tree for our Midsommar. A fresh cut tree is exceedingly heavy, and even heavier when one adds the birch branches and the flowers. The weight of these trees made it particularly dangerous to try to raise it up without any one getting hurt. We had some close calls.
At the end of our celebration the pole was cut up for firewood.
A visitor from Sweden suggested we do as they do in Sweden and have a reusable pole.
So combining the idea of a reusable pole with a way to make the whole operation less dangerous, member Dave came up with a new midsommarstang design. And thank you Dave it worked wonderfully.
So our member Dave Clausen took her thoughts to heart and invented and built a pole that not only could be reused year after year but that fit into a special base that would make raising the pole simple and not dangerous to those helping with this effort.
Three scenes on video, decorating the pole, finishing with flowers and the simple quick raising of the pole. And then three photographs of the pole 2018 Midsommar.
Our own folk art painter Diane Anderson decorates the new Dala Häst for Children
at Swedish Institute in Minneapolis. This is the official dedication 11-09-2013
At the centre of the traditional celebrations is the maypole, in Swedish called the Midsommarstången. And if you were thinking there's something rather phallic about a tall pole with two large hoops at the top, that's sort of the point -- many people believe it originated as a symbol of fertility.
Others say the shape has its roots in Norse mythology, and that it represents an axis linking the underworld, earth, and heavens. Whichever story you choose to believe, there's no denying it's a little strange to have a festival that boils down to erecting a large pole and dancing around it...
