May Day Celebrations

The Feast of Valborg and May Day

The Feast of Valborg, on the 30th of April, is often translated as Walpurgis Night.

Normally, Spring is already well established in the southern reaches of the country, while northerns will still have to wait a few weeks longer. Nevertheless, this is the evening ---- swedes welcome in the Spring. The holiday is especially celebrated in university communities. In Uppsala, site of Sweden's oldest university, students gather by the thousands in the afternoon and don their white caps to mark the change of seasons. (Nowdays, students actually only wear these caps on the Feast of Valborg and at other student festivities.) They listen to traditional hymns to the Spring and student songs, to speeches hailing the end of the dark, dank cold winter and the return of the sun and summer greenery. Many parties are held in the evening. Similar traditions have grown up in Sweden's younger universitiy town's too. In Lund, many of the festivities take place the day after, on the first day of May.

The rest of Sweden "sings in the Spring" in similar fashion, often around large community bonfires. Once peculiar to the eastern part of the country, in recent decades the custom of building bonfires has spread throughout central Sweden.

The idea of the Feast of Valborg as the first day of Spring is perhaps most widespread in Swedish towns and cities, while spring traditionally reaches the countryside the following day, especially in the south.

May Day celebrations clearly have a longer history than Valborg. May Day was often the occasion for outdoor picnics, with games and contents of various kinds. Eggs were prominent in May Day games and meals. In modern times, as in other countries, May Day is primarily Labour Day, with parades and speeches by labour leaders and socialist politicans. It was proclaimed an official holiday in 1938.

Author: Ingemar Liman

Translation: Charley Hultén