A Very Swedish Birthday

A couple weeks ago I turned seventeen. Turning seventeen is not as sweet as turning sixteen and not quite as cool as turning eighteen where you officially become an adult so I’ve found that it’s often looked over and forgotten when one thinks over all of their birthdays. For me, it was totally different. The fact that I got to celebrate this birthday in Sweden makes it more memorable then all of my other birthday’s combined. On the day of my actual birthday, September 22nd, I got to enjoy it by wandering through Stockholm. That day was fantastic and exhausting. This past weekend, was the actual birthday party. In my host family, including all of the extended relatives, there were three birthdays in the month of September. The first was my host mom Cecilia, her brother, my host brother David who is on exchange in Chicago, and me. Usually they have a combined birthday to celebrate all three of their birthdays every year but because Davis is gone and I’m here, we celebrated my birthday as well with them. The day of the party we spent preparing for the big family party. I woke up to find my host parents preparing an enormous pot of chilli con carne soup. My host sister Ebba and her boyfriend were in charge of setting up the dinner table. First we had to get another table down from the attic to add to our already large dining table and set up the chairs around it, for the twenty-two guests. As they were setting the table with beautiful china, I went out to the woods to look for decorations. I didn’t quite know what I was supposed to be getting as my host mom told me to just go grab some things from the woods so I spent a relaxing half-hour wandering through the forest examining mushrooms and grabbing leaves. I returned a little later then I had planned because as I was blissfully roaming through the forest, I just happened to lose the path that I was following and had to spend some time trying to find how to get back to the road. I finally found my way out of the woods and realized that what I had collected was not what they meant when they said decorations, as I had literally grabbed branches with leaves off of various trees. After realizing my mistake, I went back outside and picked a few small branches off of a tree, heavy with pinecones for the centerpiece of the long table. After my little adventure outdoors, I could now sit down and plan an activity for the party. After being here for over two months, I’ve already played this game many times. The game is called tipsrunda and it is where you split the party into teams and they walk around a yard or field from one question to the next answering them on a piece of paper to the best of their ability. After everyone returns, you tally up the points and whoever gets the most correct wins. I had to find ten questions that I thought would be appropriate for everyone and write them down with four possible answers. The only hard part was having to translate all of the questions to Swedish and praying that they would be understandable seeing as I was using google translate which isn’t necessarily known for its accuracy. After writing and printing my questions, Sofia and I planned the rest of the party games and then got ready for the party. At about four, people started to show up. Many of them I already knew but it was nice meeting more family members. I didn’t know this at the time but when you are handed a present, you open it immediately in front of the gift giver so I felt a little bad when I realized what I was doing wrong. I got a beautiful bouquet of flowers in brown paper wrapping which honestly made me feel like a princess and I opened them. I also received tickets to go to a holiday concert this winter with my host mom, sister, and grandparents which I am very excited about. The last gift I opened was a lovely surprise. A couple weeks ago I was shopping with Sofia when at one point as we were walking by I stated that I liked one of the Fjällräven backpacks that I had seen so many people in Sweden wearing. I forgot about that moment but she obviously didn’t because when I opened up my last present it was the exact backpack that I was talking about. They even got the right color, a cheery yellow that every time I look at fills me with joy. The backpack was from the entire family, extended family included and I was definitely not expecting it but I already love it. After mingling with everyone and welcoming everyone to the party, we all sat down for dinner. The soup was delicious paired with rice, fresh loaves of bread and salad. Before long we were all stuffed and it was time for the activities that Sofia and I planned. We first did the tipsrunda and after we did a few games inside. One of them included picking up a pea using only a straw and carrying it to the other side of the room, and another was a race to see who could transfer an orange from neck to neck until you get to the final person in the team first. These were hilarious to watch as the young and old all struggled to work together and try to win and I’d say it was a great success. After the games, we had had enough time to digest our delicious dinner and I’d say that we were all ready for cake. We all sat back down and because there were three of us celebrating our birthdays, we were presented with three cakes. I’ve heard the Swedish birthday song before so that wasn’t surprising but I was surprised when I was told I had to stand on my chair as they sang to me. As they sang, they brought the cake over to me and after three cheers, I blew out my candles and made a wish. We then did the same thing two more times with Cecilia and her brother. Then we all took a slice out of cakes and passed them on. The cake was delicious and I was glad to see that we were able to keep some leftovers for ourselves. After eating cake, we all gathered into the living room. When we were all seated and talking Cecilia busted out the apple pie flavored chips, cola, and fredagsmys, which translates to Friday candy. This was another new thing that I learned about. Instead of letting your children eat candy all week long, parents save it for the weekend and call it Friday candy. After talking for a few hours, the family members started to trickle out of the house until it was just my host family and I. We decided to save the cleaning up for the next day because we were all so exhausted and went straight to bed. I will never forget this birthday. It was so nice to feel accepted into my new family while knowing that I still had my real family half-way across the world. I feel so incredibly blessed that I was put into this family to host me and I am excited to see what the rest of the year brings.