I’ve decided to kick off the “Strange/Nice things about Sweden” series with something that seemed strange to me at first, but which I have come to regard as nice. That is the concept of name-day (namnsdag). You see, in North America, we celebrate people’s birthdays. In Sweden, they do that too. However, in addition to celebrating birthdays, they also celbrate people’s name-days, or saint’s days.
In the Catholic (and Orthodox) calendar, every day is assigned to one or more saints, many of whom you have probably not heard of, even if you are Catholic. The advantage of this is that everyone who was named after a saint, intentionally or not, has a day of the year assigned to them. In many countries, it is traditional to congratulate people on their saint’s day. I have heard that in Greece, the national phone system often crashes on the day for “Maria”, since millions of people suddenly try to call millions of other people. I suppose they just say a “hail Mary” and try again later.
I had encountered this tradition in the Catholic countries, but what is strange (and nice!) about the Swedes doing the same thing is that this is traditionally a Lutheran country, and the Lutherans have no saints. That is, they have copped this whole system from their southern neighbors without actually believing in its basis. It’s a bit like building cathedrals and using them as dance halls. But this is indicative of the strange Swedish relationship to religion, on which more in a future post.
The whole system has worked pretty well in Sweden because traditionally, people get names that correspond to some saint or other. They have also padded out the calendar with a bunch of the more pagan Scandinavian names. In recent times, Swedes have started to get creative with names (a girl was recently named “Metallica”), so there is a danger that the name-day system will gradually stop working, but we’ll have to wait and see.
So while we poor Americans each have only one special day a year, Swedes get to have two. Not that they get loads of presents on their name-day; it’s much more low-key than that. But it’s nice to be remembered once in a while.
And today, I am happy to announce, is my name-day! Yes, it’s the day of St. Gregory, or perhaps Pope Gregory v.I-XIV. In Swedish, the name is Greger. Not a particularly attractive variant, I must confess. I think I prefer the Czech version, which is Řehoř. I don’t necessarily expect anyone to notice the fact that today is my name-day, as I am a rather unusual case, but it’s exciting to have one, for the first time, just the same.