Card by SecondStoryCards
It has been awhile from my last
post. I have been too busy in other areas of life, but I try to get back to
this blog and posting. I have some ideas for new posts, but of course I’m also
open for your ideas too. So if you are interested in reading about a tradition
in Finland, please let me know and I see what I can do about it. This time I
wanted to make a post about Finnish veterans and our traditions to remember
them.
Like in many countries, also in
Finland, we remember the veterans of our wars. Thankfully we have had the opportunity
to live in peace already for decades, but we still have some 17.000 veterans in
Finland, who fought in the Winter, Continuation and Lapland Wars. Their average
age is 93 years and 2.500 of them are war-invalids.
I’m happy to say that nowadays in
Finland we honour and acknowledge our veterans, but it has not been like that always. Sometime after the Wars the veterans were forgotten, especially in 1970s they were not
at all honoured. Since the 1990s there has been a tradition in most of the parishes to light on Independence Day a candle in the cemeteries to every grave of a soldier, who has died defending Finland. This year, as Finland is celebrating her 100 years of
independency, we remember our veterans also in many other ways and treat them with all the
respect as we always should have done.
My family’s traditions have been for
years to donate our charity money of a year to one veteran association in
Finland. Quite many years I have also bought our Christmas cards from one or
two of these associations. You may read more about postcards from my earlier
post.
The Finnish postal service, Posti,
has had already a few years a campaign annually to remember the veterans. I
think it is a nice new tradition we have. One just writes a postcard and sends
it to an address given by Posti. Posti collects the cards and delivers them
then to a veteran. The purpose of this cards is to say thank you to the
veterans for keeping Finland independent. I shall participate also this year.
This a really nice tradition, which unfortunately won’t last for long.
In case you want to read more about
the Finnish army and veterans, please see my other post.
Finnish veteran organisations (pages in Finnish)
