Ulla Reilly at the crayfish party (left) The Christmas Fair in St Mary's cathedral (right)
My team when taking pictures of Santa
Lucia Pageantes
When I got to City Forest Lodge it immediately felt like being in an assembly room somewhere in Sweden with my aunt having a birthday party. The place was filled with all dressed up women chattering in Swedish. One of them shined up when seeing a younger face and touched my cheek. She asked me what I was doing so far away from home and warned me about all the dangerous places in San Francisco. Her Swedish even had an American accent and she told me she had been living abroad for the majority of her life. She was probably in her 80s but gave the impression of being my age, 23, and we ended up having a girls' talk about boyfriends. I moved on at the mingle in search for Ulla Reilly, and got a warm welcome when I found her. She got me a glass of white wine and we were the first people to sit down at one of the decorated tables. This evening, SWEA was throwing a Crayfish Party, something that is probably considered one of the most Swedish things one can do. At Crayfish Parties, Swedish people gather together and eat the years’ haul of crayfish, drink shots of Absolut Vodka and sing songs about alcohol. A must is also to have paper faces in the ceiling and to wear funny hats and bibs. This is something almost every Swedish person would do at least once every year in September. And it is where my experience with SWEA first started.
Three months later, my investigation in SWEA ends at the highlight of the year – the Christmas fair. That is by far their biggest event with lots of items for sale that the women have been putting their soul into cooking, baking and sewing. Ulla Reilly already had told me about this event when we first met at the crayfish party, she then seemed very proud and excited when telling me about it; it is indeed the happening of the year. I will not go back to Sweden for Christmas this year, but I feel that this bazaar has everything that Swedish Christmas is about anyway, except my family of course. There are the special Swedish open-faced shrimp sandwiches, meatballs, waffles with strawberry and jam, cinnamon rolls, ginger bread, saffron bread, candy and glögg (mulled wine). At the market you are also able to find used Swedish books for a dollar. They even have a Lucia Pageantes, a Scandinavian tradition in which a choir is dressed up in white and one girl wears candles in her hair. The first part of the fair I got to help out taking pictures of the children sitting in Santa’s lap telling him what they wish for Christmas. After that I got some time off to say hello to my new “aunts” and two of my Swedish friends came to share the atmosphere with me.
Little did I know at the crayfish party that I was going to meet so many different and interesting women and that they would contribute a lot to my stay here in San Francisco. Throughout the semester I have been inspired and fascinated by these women. I believe that the reason for this is that I can imagine myself being one of them some day. If I were to live abroad for a longer period of time, this is the kind of organization that would help me through it. I admire them a lot for all the work that they put in to actually being able to make the organization what it is. It surprised me at first that the women in the group were so different from each other and I wondered what they all had in common. Now I know that they have something very important in common - the feeling of being something in between Swedish and American and a desire to keep everything that is Swedish, but not necessarily the desire to go back to Sweden. What a joy for them to find others with the same experience and feelings as themselves. Others that actually understand them.
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