Diving in the bucolic wonderland in the Arctic circle – Finland

Exploring the Culture of Finland

Nearly 200,000 lakes, saunas, and art festivals make up the unique culture of Finland, one of Europe’s most magical countries. Its landscapes are diverse, ranging from coastal plains to inland rivers, lakes, and hills. Daily life in Finland includes skiing, hiking, sailing, and a balanced mix of small-town life with modern cities. The Finnish values common sense, education, honesty, and equality. Finland is a country that celebrates summers of seemingly endless sun and finds light in the near total darkness of winter!

Family Life

Finns view themselves as egalitarian people whose culture is based on democratic principles of respect and interdependence. They like people for who they are and not for what they do for a living, their professional accomplishments, or how much money they earn. They pride themselves on being honest and sincere in their personal relationships. In Finland, gender equality is very important in most families. it’s common for both parents to cook dinner or clean the house.

Finns are generally kind and open-minded, even though they can be a bit shy at first. Families are usually small, with only one or two children. In the culture of Finland, people appreciate punctuality, good manners, and practicality. Finns love outdoor activities and public access rights “Everyman’s rights” grant access to nature for all inhabitants.

Teenage Life in Finland

Teenagers in Finland have a lot of independence and enjoy spending time outdoors, even in the winter. Finland’s active culture includes going cycling, boating, skiing, soccer, track-andfield, and pesäpallo (Finnish baseball). Finnish teenagers attend high school formal dances called vanhojen tanssit with both modern and traditional music.

Most active evenings are Friday and Saturday evenings when people like to go out. Teenagers usually go out with friends to the movies, having coffee with friends, or someone’s home. They may also go for a walk around in the city and people who have their driving license go “cruising around.”

Finland has one of the best education systems in the world, so Finnish teenagers are usually engaged and challenged in school. They are also direct communicators in school, often referring to their teachers by their first names! Teenage children often make their own decisions when their parents are not available.

Official Language

Finnish is the main language of Finland. Swedish is also an official language, and both are spoken in bilingual areas.

Communication Style

Based on stereotype, Finns are often said to be cold and difficult to get to know. Though some might need more time to “warm up” to strangers, once one gets a friend in Finland, it’s for life! The Finns tend to favour a very direct communication style. In the culture of Finland, people in appreciate an honest and straight forward manner of speaking. In addition, Finnish people are typically more comfortable with moments of silence in conversation than in other cultures. While generally quiet, they often have great senses of humour!

The Finnish Diet

While it has been said of the French that they live to eat, it has been said that Finns eat to live. Everyday food tends to be simple but nutritious and mealtimes less formal than in some other countries.

During the week, Finnish families may prepare and eat food on their own. On weekends, many families dine together and catch up on their activities that week. Meals tend to be simple but nutritious, including meat, fish, potatoes, pasta, bread and dairy products. As can be expected in a country of over 187,000 lakes, there is an abundance of different kinds of fish available, especially along the coast. Coffee is a favourite beverage, even among teenagers, often with a sweet wheat bread called pulla.

Finland has its own version of a smörgåsbord, called the voileipäpöytä. At a voileipäpöytä, there’s fish, potatoes, berries, and dairy products, along with rye bread. Another common Finnish dish is makkara (sausage), which is roasted over a fire and eaten with sinappi (mustard). However, Finland’s most unique delicacy is reindeer! The Finns eat reindeer stew, steak, cutlets, meatballs, and even tartare.

Daily life and social customs

Many Finnish customs are closely associated with forests, which Finns have historically seen not as dark foreboding places but rather as offering refuge and shelter. In one of Finland’s signature literary works, Seven Brothers, 19th-century writer Aleksis Kivi depicts the socially inept brothers’ flight to the protection of the woods. Today, on weekends and during holidays, Finns flee from urban stress to their forest summerhouses.

Other customs associated with trees and wood are alive and well in Finland. Bonfires are lit at Midsummer, the doorways of houses are decorated with birches, and leafy birch whisks are still used in the traditional wooden sauna. On Easter, mämmi, a pudding made from malt and rye flour, is traditionally eaten from containers made of (or made to resemble) birch bark. In late winter, while snow covers the ground, birch branches are brought indoors to remind the household of the coming spring.

Although Finns consider Santa Claus to have his permanent home in Korvatunturi, in northern Finland, the spruce Christmas tree is a relative newcomer to the country, having made its first appearance in the 1820s. Now the Christmas tree is a fixture of Finnish Christmas celebrations, which also involve special foods, including rice porridge (made with milk and cinnamon), a baked glazed ham, and a potato and carrot or rutabaga gratin. The holiday is not complete without a Christmas sauna bath.

New Year’s Eve is celebrated with private and public fireworks displays. Large crowds also gather in Helsinki’s Senate Square to hear speeches and music. Perhaps the most-interesting Finnish New Year’s Eve tradition is the melting of tin: small bits of tin (or lead), usually shaped like horseshoes, are melted and then thrown into cold water, with the resulting shape or its shadow interpreted as a symbolic harbinger of the future.

Another of the most important holidays in Scandinavia, Midsummer—which celebrates the longest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere, the summer solstice—is known in Finland as Juhannus (a name that is derived from the feast of St. John the Baptist). The solstice falls on June 20 or 21 and is officially celebrated in Finland on the Saturday that falls between June 20th and 26th, with the three-day weekend national holiday beginning on Friday, Midsummer’s Eve. Typically, the celebration involves music, dance, and the lighting of bonfires, as well as trips to the country for city dwellers.

Vappu, which effectively combines the celebration of Walpurgis Night and May Day, is yet another important holiday in Finland. The celebration of that holiday, which dates to at least the 18th century, begins on the evening of April 30, usually with merrymaking related to the drinking of alcoholic beverages, and continues the following day, including more familyrelated activities.

Wood is an essential component of the typical Finnish sauna, which is almost universally constructed out of birch or other sturdy wood beams. Bathers sit on wooden benches, splashing water on the hot stones of the stove and whisking each other with birch branches, just as their ancestors would have done millennia earlier. Traditionally, the sauna was a sacred place for the Finns, used not only for the weekly sauna bath but also for ritual purposes. This was particularly the case for those rituals performed by women, such as healing the sick and preparing the dead for burial. The sauna was also used for doing laundry and for key farming activities, such as curing meat and fermenting and drying malt. Given its importance to the farm economy, it is logical that the sauna was originally built within the enclosure surrounding the farm’s outbuildings. The current placement of most saunas on a lakeside or coastal inlet goes back only to the early 20th century, following the fashion of the gentry’s villas.

For a long time the sauna (whose name comes from a Finnish-Sami word) was usually heated only once a week, because it took a whole day to prepare it to stand several rounds of bathers (with men and women bathing separately). Many Finns believe sauna baths provide healing for the mind and body, and they are taken with almost religious reverence. Although not playing the central role it does in Finnish culture, the custom of sauna bathing is also widespread among the other Finnic peoples in the Baltic region—the Estonians, Karelians, Veps, and Livonians—as well as among Latvians and Lithuanians.