June is a busy time in Denmark, when we're either having summer or pretending to have summer. If the weather is good, you can bet that every Dane around will be leaving work early to sunbathe in the park with sausages on the grill and a beer in hand. If the weather is not good, everyone will still go to the beach, stay out late eating ice cream, etc--but wear raincoats the whole time.
When we're feeling disappointed in the weather, I like to remind myself that summer doesn't officially start until June 21, the solstice. (So all those cold, rainy, windy days in June don't really count). Everyone knows the solstice is the longest day of the year, and here it's pretty darn long. I know we've written about it before, but 20 hours of visible light, when the sun neither rises nor sets, bears mentioning again.
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| Sculpture by the Sea 2015. |
Considering the Danish "summer" weather, I guess it shouldn't come as a surprise that the big Danish midsummer festival prominently features bonfires. June 23 is Sankt Hans Aften-- a strange holiday that blends ancient magical rites with the saints' day of John the Baptist, June 24th. John the Baptist is known as "Johannes Døberens" in Danish, and his name is easily shortened to "Hans." And since the 23rd is the night before his day, it's called Sankt Hans
Aften-- or Eve. Notice that that date is exactly six months before Christmas Eve and consider that the Gospel of John says of Jesus, "He must become greater, I must become less." It's nicely poetic--after John the Baptist's day, the days grow shorter and shorter until midwinter (Christmas), when they become longer again.
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| Typical Danish Sankt Hans weather. |
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| But everyone imagines it'll actually be like this. |
Shortly after all this hullabaloo, it's time for graduation. In Danish this is known as "becoming a student." I don't know why, since it seems to me like when one
stops being a student. Suddenly the streets are full of young people wearing funny hats. Unlike at American graduations, students here proudly wear their hats all the time for a week or so, and it's customary to greet and congratulate the people you see wearing them--even if you don't know them at all.
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| One of my lovely students. |
Not only that, but the new students celebrate their student-ness with a long tour around the city, typically in a decked-out vintage wagon. They'll spend all day driving from one home to another, making sure to visit the parents of every student in the graduating class. The parents are responsible for providing drinks and sausages (has anyone else noticed that virtually nothing in Denmark can happen without a sausage?) and taking many, many pictures. The students are responsible for sitting in the trucks making lots of noise and waving at everybody they see, but fortunately not for actually driving the vehicles.
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| C describes these as "the noisy buses. Dyt, dyt!" |
