Over the decades, the Midsummers Festival in
Lindsborg has confirmed generations of Swedish
tradition, encouraged new ventures, tried new venues
and refined old ones. And over those decades,
Midsummers has embraced the color and energy
of life in a prairie town, bringing gaiety to new
levels. Here is a place that takes its celebrating
seriously, a place devoted to its heritage.
Now in its 43rd year, Lindsborg Midsummers recognizes
a Swedish holiday – this year, on Saturday,
June 21 – with traditional food, music, dancing,
art, games and raising the Midsommarstång
(Midsommar pole). Midsummers also comes on
the 22nd anniversary of the establishment of
sister city ties between Munkfors, Sweden, and
Lindsborg.
In Sweden, Midsommar especially celebrates
the summer solstice, a magical time when daylight
there lasts nearly all night, with all-day music and
dancing. At the center of the festivities in nearly
every village is the majstång (maypole) trimmed
with garlands of flowers, often in the form of two
circlets of flowers hung from a crossbar. In addition
to decorating the maypole, townspeople see to
it that every house gets a row of twigs around the
front door, and even boats and cars are festooned.
Once the maypole is raised, usually in the center of
a park, the music and dancing begin a celebration
that lasts well into the bright night.
*
SINCE JUNE 1971, Midsummers has been revived
in Lindsborg as part of the community’s
annual calendar of Swedish-American festivals.
Some aspects are unique to Lindsborg, such as arts
and crafts displays and sales, and others are more
traditional, such as raising the maypole.
Four years ago Midsummers in Lindsborg moved
from North (Swensson) Park to a former, historical
site near South (Riverside) Park; then, a couple of
years ago, organizers selected downtown and the
central business district as the epicenter, and it’s
been a popular choice. The event offers live entertainment
throughout the day, and many children’s
activities, including a bouncy castle, mini-train,
crafts, games, story-telling, and more.
The ever-popular “make your own” blomkran,
(crown of fl owers), one of the most important parts
of the festival, will be organized by the Lindsborg
Arts Council. The celebrated Lindsborg Swedish
Folk Dancers and Fiddlers, and the Folkdanslag,
will perform Scandinavian dances in Swedish
costumes in the entertainment circle at Main and
Lincoln. Visitors and onlookers are always encouraged
to join in the dancing – and especially around
the Maypole later, when the action moves south, to
Heritage Square adjacent to the Old Mill Museum
and Riverside Park.
All-day events begin at 7 a.m. with a Midsummer’s
5K/2-mile walk starting at the McPherson County
Old Mill Museum. Registration for the Festival’s
3rd annual Kubb Championships (Heritage Square)
begins at 8 and this year, the Midsummers Golf
Tournament begins at 9 at the Lindsborg Golf
Club. Downtown, the action begins quickly as arts
and crafts booths open, vendors offer their wares
and entertainment begins in the Circle.
About “Kubb.” The game (it rhymes with tube)
is sometimes called “Viking Chess,” a lawn sport
in which batons are tossed to topple opponents’
kubbs (tall ornamental blocks) and gain the chance
to knock off the big King Kubb; it all happens in a
26-feet by 13-feet playing field, or “pitch.” Kubb,
its history spanning centuries, is a popular lawn
sport in Europe and Scandinavia, and its appeal
has spread from its northern America niche, where
it is sometimes played indoors during winter. It’s
even a popular tavern sport (large taverns, we
would think).
There are entertainment, fun and games in
Heritage Square, and later, as dusk approaches,
Midsummers moves again uptown to the
Sundstrom Center for more music, a concert and
dance.
Everyone joins, everyone delights ‒ young, old
and in-between, 6th generation Swede to firstvisit-
ever. The tradition is about community, its
open heritage.
*
WE RECALL the theme for the 2010 Midsummers
Festival, Coming Home to Sweden, and it now
seems ever more appropriate. For many, Midsummers
is about connection, about coming home, in
a way, even for those who call home somewhere
else.
In our brief 13 years here we have come to know
many of the 17 Malms once listed in the phone
book; we have known people who were raised in
Lindsborg or Marquette or somewhere in the Valley
and then left, dreaming of success in far lands,
and after a long absence, fulfi lled or otherwise, returned
to live here for good.
Last week one long-married couple, among our
dearest friends, were on a front porch on North
Main, waiting for movers to arrive from Houston
with their belongings. He is a burly Irishman from
Queens, in New York; she is a Swede, from Lindsborg.
They left 30 years ago for northeast Kansas
and then Texas, he a writer and editor, she a teacher.
Now after lo, these decades, they are home, again.
There are other couples, other types, who have
come “back.” More than a few will say that once,
long ago, they had happened by for just a quick
look and a meal, on the way to somewhere else –
and years later they’re still here.
It turns out that there is comfort in such a place, in
the warm laughter of old men at coffee, in friendly
banter at a grocery store, in the breeze that carries
the happy cries in a park. There is, even, a kind of
reassurance in the paint-chipped buildings along
Main Street, in the trees nuzzling the slow sweep
of a river, in the gaunt old church outside town, the
skinny traffi c light downtown (now gone), and in
the familiar faces of the same crowds, the ebb-fl ow
of their traffi c at ball games and concerts, at commencement,
at weddings and funerals.
*
THIS IS often a time, as Midsummers concludes,
when some people, especially newcomers, are
surprised that they have taken root so quickly;
after only a few tender years, they feel the staunch
old American pull of home. This is born of many
things, but the old-timers say it comes mostly of
a shared joy of living. The pulsating call of home
has touched a million different corners of our
land, once and long ago defined by the directions
of rivers, home that was once the dry wash of the
Cimarron, the sandscapes along the Arkansas, the
shadowy bluffs of the Solomon, the sandstone hills
along the Saline, the gentle sweep of the Smoky
Valley. Today we have the call of all the places that
remain part of the land around them, places that
carry the vanishing echoes of our youth, the glow
of memories unlocked.
What is common among the new, the old, the
in-between? They have found places that incubate
and brace the human process, where intelligence,
kindness, imagination and sensibility, and courage
and fun, are all worth the courting. They have
found a community of the heart, the closest community
of all.
We might say they have found Midsummers.
***
Cruising along
on that glide path to zero
The state’s top environmental regulator has
given a green light for construction of a $2.8
billion coal-fueled power factory only moments
before new federal regulations were announced to
limit green house gas emissions at utility plants.
The federal law conflicts with the more liberal
Kansas regulations, setting the scene for another
states rights feud, the kind our forebears suffered
long before the turn of the century – the 19th century,
that is. Remember Marbury v. Madison? TR
and the Trust busters? (Hint: They weren’t rock
bands.)
Our road to coal-burning follows the state’s
approval for a 50 percent expansion at Seaboard
Foods’ hog feeding operation in Greeley County,
one that will house nearly 400,000 animals and
produce twice the amount of annual waste as the
city of Wichita. The Greeley County facility will
be the second largest of its kind in the United
States.
Crucial to the hog farm expansion was a wastewater
permit, quietly and quickly approved by the
Kansas Department of Health and Environment in
spite of a Kansas Geological Survey report that
declared the site’s water supply – the Ogallala
Aquifer beneath it – “effectively exhausted.”
And the future for our air? Water?
No matter. These days, according to our governor,
are for yesterdays, a return to those better
times, when men had the freedom to run a business
how they wished, to the 19th century, when
government looked the other way, rather than got
in the way, of certain economic freedoms.
Yesterday was a better day. And the 19th century
is dead center on our governor’s glide path to zero,
that path to a state with no income tax, no federal
regulations, no air, no water, and ultimately no
government. A state with nothing at all.
– JOHN MARSHALL
