I have posted some words about Finnish traditions relating to summer, f. ex how to spend midsummer and the of Jaakko. Still I noticed that I have not made a post about the basic Finnish way of spending summer. So I think it is time to fix that.
Average, working Finn has annually 5 weeks vacation, 4 weeks during summer (May - September) and a week in the winter. Schoolchildren have much more vacation, 10 weeks in the summer, few days during autumn, ca. 2 weeks at Christmas and a week in the winter.
Having vacation is not even 100 years old tradition. The first law about annual holiday was given as late as 1922. Back then the annual holiday had to be at least 7 days. After the WWII the law was changed couple of times and in 1977 the right to 4 + 1 weeks was granted to all of those workers, who had worked with the same company at least 10 years. Nowadays we get 2.5 days/month we work, when we have worked at least one year with the same employer.
How do we then spend our vacation?
Of course the wealthier people and the nobility have had spare time for centuries and have had a house in a city or town and also a manor in the rural area. But it was in the early 19th century, when people started acually have vacation. They acquired a villa outside the city area and the wife with children and most of the servants moved there for the summertime. The husband visited the villa as often as he could. Usually he worked in such position, that the work was stopped during summer for a certain period and the husband could also escape from the city.
In the early 20th century also the working class gradually started to have some holidays. After the WWII lots of people moved to the cities from the countryside, but as their roots where in the parish from where they left, they quite often built a small summer house for the family. The property was very often bought or detached from their parents’ farm’s land.
According to Statistics Finland 34,6 % of working labour have their summer holiday in July. In year 2014 the Finns made 7,9 million trips to abroad, mostly to Estonia, Sweden, Mediterranean and Thailand. In homeland we made 5,9 million trips, which included a paid overnight, and about 19 million overnight trips to own cottage or to visit relatives or friends. There are 500 400 summer cottages in Finland (every 5th household in Finland own a cottage). Of those approximately half have shorter than 65 meters distance to water: lake or sea. So yes, we swim and go to the sauna a lot during our vacation. This summer has not been so warm, so at the moment the surface water temperature is in Southern parts of Finland 17 - 20 C and in Lapland 13 - 15 C, except now in August with highs around + 25 C. So the sauna is really appreciated. If you want to read about the dark side of the cottage living, visit this blog.
Also every 7th household owns some kind of boat. It can be small rowing boat or a big boat with few cabins.
And during the summer season we prefer to eat fresh strawberries, new potatoes, ice cream and grilled meat or sausages.
We also visit open-air summer theatres, different kind of festivals, weddings (August is the busiest month for weddings), christenings (in 2014 most babies were born in July) and confirmation parties (84 % of Finns at the age of 15 have their confirmation).
There are 233 open-air summer theatres, which have around 1 million visitors during summer.
Festivals you find from here
Lots of ways to then spend summer and prepare for fall and winter.
:)
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