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The village’s unmarried women all place a personal belonging in the pot and leave it under a fig tree overnight, where – folklore has it – the magic of the day imbues the objects with prophetic powers, and the girls in question dream of their future husbands.

One of the oldest rituals is called Klidonas, and it involves local virgins gathering water from the sea. Still, in many villages in the country’s north, the ancient rites are still celebrated. There, as in many European countries, the pagan solstice got co-opted by Christianity and rebranded as St. There is a similar mythology about dreaming of one’s future spouse in parts of Greece. Part of the day's rituals involves building bonfires. In parts of the north, locals celebrate with a custom called Klidonas. In Greece, the summer solstice is celebrated on St. “There used to be a tradition among unmarried girls, where if they ate something very salty during Midsummer, or else collected several different kinds of flowers and put these under their pillow when they slept, they would dream of their future husbands,” he said. While the libations have a hand in the subsequent baby boom, Swahn pointed out that even without the booze, Midsummer is a time rich in romantic ritual. There are historical pictures of people drinking to the point where they can’t go on anymore,” said Swahn. “Drinking is the most typical Midsummer tradition. “A lot of children are born nine months after Midsummer in Sweden,” Jan-Öjvind Swahn, a Swedish ethnologist and the author of several books on the subject, told CNN before his death in 2016. They also feast on herring and vodka (whether that’s romantic or not is probably a matter of personal preference). Their traditions include dancing around a maypole – a symbol which some view as phallic. Now let’s turn our attention to what’s really on our minds: the romantic and sexy side of the solstice. When the sun reaches its apex in the Northern Hemisphere, that’s the summer solstice.Īt that time, “the sun is directly over the Tropic of Cancer, which is located at 23.5° latitude North, and runs through Mexico, the Bahamas, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, India and southern China,” according to the National Weather Service.Īfter long, dark winters, no wonder the Swedes like to celebrate the longest day of the year. So, throughout the year, different parts of Earth get the sun’s direct rays,” according to NASA. “As Earth orbits the sun, its tilted axis always points in the same direction. But this axis tilts – at an angle of 23.5 degrees. That’s because the Earth is aligned on an axis, an imaginary pole going through the center of our planet. But the amount of sunlight we get in the Northern Hemisphere has been increasing daily ever since. Question: Why don’t we just get 12 hours of daylight all year?Īnswer: Folks all over the planet actually did get nearly equal doses of day and night back during the spring equinox. This tilt exposes the Northern Hemisphere to more direct sunlight than the Southern Hemisphere. Notice the angle of the terminator (the line between day and night). This NASA photo shows the summer solstice from 2018.