Tradition
In Swedish tradition many holidays have their main celebrations not on the Day but on the Eve of the holiday, meaning one day earlier. This is especially significant on Christmas Eve and Midsummer Eve, but also on New Year's Eve, however in this case not really unique. Christmas Eve, Midsummer Eve and New Year's Eve might very well be the single most important holidays during the entire year for Swedes. These days are however only de facto holidays. There are also de facto half-day holidays (with some variation depending on employer): Twelfth Night, Maundy Thursday, Walpurgis Night, the day before Ascension Day and the day before All Saints's Day.
The Swedish calendar also provides for special flag days. Flag days are in some cases official holidays or the birthdays and namedays for the Royal family and informal holidays like Gustav Adolfsdagen (Gustavus Adolphus Day, November 6) or the Nobeldagen (Nobel Day, December 10). There is no formal connection between flag days and holiday. Many flag days are ordinary workdays.
The official National holiday of Sweden is celebrated on June 6, a status which it was finally granted in 2005. The Name days in Sweden calendar is also denoted. It has a long history, originally a calendar of saints, some names have stuck throughout centuries while others have been modernized.
Read more about this topic: Public Holidays In Sweden
Famous quotes containing the word tradition:
“This is no argument against teaching manners to the young. On the contrary, it is a fine old tradition that ought to be resurrected from its current mothballs and put to work...In fact, children are much more comfortable when they know the guide rules for handling the social amenities. It’s no more fun for a child to be introduced to a strange adult and have no idea what to say or do than it is for a grownup to go to a formal dinner and have no idea what fork to use.”
—Leontine Young (20th century)
“And hereby hangs a moral highly applicable to our own trustee-ridden universities, if to nothing else. If we really wanted liberty of speech and thought, we could probably get it—Spain fifty years ago certainly had a longer tradition of despotism than has the United States—but do we want it? In these years we will see.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“Unless criticism refuses to take itself quite so seriously or at least to permit its readers not to, it will inevitably continue to reflect the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties of the Culture Religion of Modernism.”
—Leslie Fiedler (b. 1917)