The pagan Swedes – Part I: Easter witches

A few weeks ago one of my Facebook-friends here in Argentina wrote that he, as a non-christian-believer wanted to make the 21^st of June the summer solstice, a national holiday. It was obviously posted as an ironic message, at least as far as I interpreted it. Obviously I had to reply and let my friend know that in Sweden IT IS a national holiday (at least the Saturday most close to it) and that it is one of our most important feast-days of the year. This got me to think of our pagan culture up there in the north… We are Christian protestants and all that, but we still have kept many of our pagan traditions and they are still just as important (if not more) as the Christian traditions and feasts. Therefore I intend to write some about the Swedish pagan traditions here in the blog as they occur during the year. But I want to underline, again, that this is non-academic so should you be more interested in the details and the actual history behind them, please just consult Wikipedia =)

Maundy Thursday the Swedish children dress up as Easter witches and go around the neighbourhoods asking for candy and stuff. And as is very common in Swedish traditions, they all dress up in the VERY SAME manner. There are some basics that need to be part of the costume to make it an Easter witch, such as: black freckles, red round rouge spots on the cheeks, scarf on the head etc – please see the photo for a better illustration. Back in the days when I and my friends did this we gave out homemade “Happy Easter-cards” to the people when they opened the doors while saying in chorus just that – “Happy Easter”! We always brought bags and such to carry the candy and money (!) we received during the day. I am not sure if the kids of today still do that. Maybe it sounds somewhat like the English-speaking countries' Halloween-tradition, but as you can tell there are major differences. Since I am not at all scientific about this I can not say who inspired who etc. Well, anyway, the tradition is that the Easter witches end Maundy Thursday night going by broom (kvast) to dance with the devil at Blåkulla. It does not sound very Christian now, does it?