A Backyard Midsummer Celebration

"This is very midsummer madness..." - William Shakespeare

Before I get into the meat of this blog post, let me update our blog readers on a couple of things. First I know that 3 weeks ago I promised a coupon-organizing blog post. Why am I SO behind on that? Well, my coupon box broke. Yes, the lid came off and it isn't fixable. I just have not gotten around to purchasing a new one (hope to do that this week maybe?) and I can't bring myself to blog about coupon organizing until my box is in tip-top shape. So I apologize for the delay and will hopefully fix that soon!

ALSO, I know I put a lot of posts (such as this one) about things that David and I do to celebrate our heritage and ancestry (even from hundreds of years back). This may seem a bit strange to some of you, and so I plan to do a post soon on why it is so important to me to instill a strong sense of heritage in our family. So, before you judge us as being totally weird, wait on that post as well, lol.

That being said, let me get on to the awesome Midsummer celebration that we had in our backyard this past Thursday. Midsummer is primarily a European celebration, especially big in Sweden (where one branch of my family is from). You can read all about it on the Wikipedia article ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midsummer ). As I have stated in the past, David and I clearly aren't wild about the association of so many modern holidays and celebrations with their pagan roots. SO, we make sure we find a way to have lots of celebrations but in a Christ-honoring fashion. For Midsummer, we decided to make the theme thanking the Lord for the season of summer and what it brings (the growth of crops, warm rays of sunshine, time to spend outdoors with friends and family).

As you may have read in the article, the main part of Midsummer celebrations are bonfires (yes, despite the 90+ degree heat). So OF COURSE we had to have that. Also, it is common in European countries for people to pick greenery from their property and make crowns out of it to wear for the celebration. So we didn't want to miss out on that part, either. An unconventional celebration for the US? YES. Are we probably the only people in urban Greensboro that did this Thursday evening? Um, probably! Were we thankful that our neighbors did not come out and see this? Oh, you have no idea. (Although my sweet husband, who is not embarrassed as easily as me, said he hoped they would come out and see it). But alas, here I am blogging about it. So, we made our crowns of greenery - me, David, and we even talked my parents into coming over and doing the same. We sooo wish David's parents could have been here for it, although they are probably happy they weren't as nutty as we must have looked.

Here is David, building our bonfire (note that he is wearing his greenery crown)...









Then my parents showed up. We agreed that my Mother's crown was among the best. The rest of us had to use tape or velcro to hold ours together. Hers was all natural and included gardenias! lol (I still CANNOT believe that my parents went along with this celebration - I was SHOCKED)





Mom's crown looked so good on her that I decided to try it on once, just for a picture, before putting my silly crown back on...



We all had a good time relaxing, while David alternated between sitting with us and keeping up the fire (he is SO good)...









One more funny midsummer thing - there are a number of funny "folk beliefs" associated with the celebration (sort of like our Old Wives Tales here). One is that, if a person jumps over the bonfire, then the corn in the upcoming growing season will grow as high as their jump, haha. Looks like my Dad cleared the fire pretty well...




Like I said, don't judge until you read my soon-coming blog post on why heritage is so important for us. For now, just laugh quietly and enjoy, lol. :-) Happy Midsummer!