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June 19, 2005
Midsummer's Day: Photos and Commentary
I had the very special pleasure to attend my first Midsummer's Day festival in Lindsborg yesterday. It was a beautiful day, sunny but not too hot and the north(Swensson) park in Lindsborg was filled with people enjoying the day. There was a wide variety of good food available, and many local artists and crafts-people were on hand sharing the products of their creativity.
Sheryl and I had a lot of fun. We were a little busy at first, tending to our Midsummer's Day committee responsibilities*, but for the most part we got to simply enjoy the day. For me, the were two highlights that stand out. They both speak to the timelessness nature of festivals and celebrations such as Lindsborg's Midsummer's Day.
In the mid-afternoon, watching the youthful Swedish dancers dancing to Swedish songs peformed by their classmates and leaders, I was struck by the thought that a very similar scene was likely played out a couple of hundred years ago, in Sweden, by the distant relatives of those I was watching perform. Timeless.
Later in the day, at Heritage Park (near the Smoky Hill River), came the traditional raising of the maypole. This was followed by more Swedish dancing, including one number that involved almost 1/3 of the audience. Charlotte Anderson, the dance director, did a wonderful job with this dance, especially considering how many of the audience had never done anything like it before. It was something to see!
I took around 280 photos yesterday and pulled out 39 I felt were worth sharing on Flickr; they are located at my Midsummer's Day photo set; they're also available as a Midsummer's slide show. From that set I have posted 9 here**.
Simu-posted at All the Pages and Little Sweden, USA.
* Sheryl is on the Midsummer's program committee and I did publicity. That included working with local radio personality James Keith; he did 5 "live remotes" from the park, and I was the opening and closing guest.
** A note about my use of Flickr. I'm once again hosting my own images on this blog, and providing links to more images on Flickr. I'm in no way dissatisfied with Flickr; it's just that I wanted this site to by augmented by Flickr, but to not depend on them for something as fundamental as the photos I'm blogging. Also, and this is secondary to simply wanting to host my own blog images, none of the available Flickr sizes quite worked for me. They were either too small or too large. Hosting my own images also means setting my own image size. I like using flickr for previously stated reasons: sharing with a larger audience, ability to view images in different sizes, and so on.
Posted by mike at June 19, 2005 04:57 PM
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Comments
Thanks for sharing! The images are great...my favorite is of the maypole going up! You've put to words to thoughts of (I'm sure) hundreds and hundreds of people that have attended this festival and/or have contributed to it's success. I'm going to the flickr site now to see the rest!
Posted by: Betty Nelson at June 20, 2005 08:49 AM
Wonderful photos. I'll post the few I have worth posting on my site this week.
Kalle
Posted by: DocIke at July 5, 2005 11:51 PM
Great shots. Mike, I've set up a little Sweden weblog. Want to join?
Posted by: Carl Isaacson at August 6, 2005 04:20 PM
We have at last picked up the wonderful pictures of your midsommarfest
It looks like Sweden is not only to find here where we live.
Posted by: Barbro and Lars Ferb at August 19, 2006 05:30 AM
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