It's a lovely quiet public holiday here in Sweden, being Trettondedag Jul and everyone is off work. Literally translated, that’s the thirteenth day of Christmas, but if you ask most Swedes why it is a holiday, they don’t have a clue. They will usually mumble something about "Well that's the day we take down the Christmas tree and put away all the decorations" (You need a day off of work to do THAT?). However, they are wrong - that day, Tjugondag Knut, will be on the 13th, thus the confusion with the 6th which is named the thirteenth day!

In fact, today is the Epiphany in the church year. It is the day celebrated in memory of the Three Wise Men who visited the baby Jesus. I remember this being an important day when I lived in Italy, as it was the day that Befana came and left gifts for the children. But here in Sweden it is merely yet another day off with no particular celebrations. The Swedes may have run the Catholics out of the country in the early 1500's, but they managed to retain almost all of the old catholic feast days. Tradition dies very hard in this country.

So everything is shut. Now you expect this on a public holiday. But as in a lot of cases in Sweden, the day before the public holiday is a sort of "poet’s day" (viz. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow's Saturday) where the shops shut at 1pm and everyone gets ready for the public holiday. Pretty funny really – you need a half day off to prepare for a full day off.


That's all well and good if you know and remember that it's a public holiday (or red day). If you are like me and lose track of these things you’ll find yourself out shopping at normal time and be confronted by this:



Yes, folks, downtown Nynäshamn at 5.30pm – peak hour and all that! I was thinking of poor Kate in New York and her peak hour traffic as I gazed down on the scene before me. Actually, it was hard to tell that the shops were shut as it is always this quiet here. But shut they were, and had been since 1pm!

I know, I know. You are thinking "Stupid foreigner" and yes, there is an element of truth in that. But was I the only one to forget? Nope. Even the bus company in Stockholm forgot that although the calendar said it was Monday, it was really a Saturday as far as their services went. I read about it in today's Dagens Nyheter. The story is about those who ventured into the cemetery at Skogskyrkogården. This is no ordinary cemetery - it's listed as a UNESCO World Heritage site and is HUGE. Take a gander at the panorama camera. You need a bus to get around it, and the full circuit takes the bus 15 minutes, so that gives you an idea of the area we are talking about.

Swedes like to visit the cemetery on special days and weekends, so Bus 183 operates only on weekends and days before public holidays. Oops! People took the subway to Skogskyrkogården and waited for bus 183 to appear. It didn’t. There were calls to the bus company who said "Sorry. But it’s too short notice now to get a bus on that route". Their suggestion was for people to pay for a taxi, then send the receipt in to the bus company. But many people had no money on them so had to go home without visiting their loved ones.

Sweden seems to have been on holidays since the day before Christmas here thanks to the system of "squeeze days" or klämdag. This is something I've never come across before. "Swedes are world best" (one of their favourite phrases) at finding excuses for not being at work. They created the 'squeeze day', explained once by a Swede as a day squeezed in between a holiday and a weekend.

We had the day before Christmas, Christmas Day AND the day AFTER Christmas as official holidays. Many seemed to have treated New Year's Eve as a holiday as well as New Year's Day. That left Monday and Tuesday of this week so why bother going to work right? Then the day after New Year's is a Friday so lets take that day off as well. And as the next Tuesday is 13-day jul so we better have Monday as a "squeeze day". And for the very clever, they may even have "squeezed" the Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. This gives them from December 23 to January 11th off from work.

We do that a bit in Australia. But there we take our vacation time. Here this is IN ADDITION to the between 5 and 7 weeks vacation most people get. I laughed at this "taking days off" to my Swedish friends who became very indignant. These are NOT days off, they assure me. They work for them. It seems they do this by getting their almanac and calculating how many days they need to "squeeze" this year. They then work out that if they say "work" an extra 7.3 minutes every day, then they reckon it's not a holiday but time off in lieu of the overtime. Get it?

If they are lucky, the Swedes can enjoy what can only be described as a 'squeeze week' during the first week of May. There's the weekend, then a squeeze Monday, as Tuesday is the 1st of May and a public holiday. Hopefully Ascension Day falls on the Thursday so it's no good going to work on the Wednesday and the Friday is squeezed between Thursday and Saturday and before you know it it's already the following weekend.

Interesting thought process. It operates in no other country in the world, but this does not perturb the Swedes who are used to standing out from the crowd. It must be a huge nightmare for business to be forced to virtually shut down as the staff have managed to "squeeze" a day off. I think that this will be coming to an end in these new EU days. Some large companies are already talking about outlawing this practice in the New Year.

All I can say is Good luck. As I said, once it's a tradition in this country it is almost impossible to remove! They may yell Carpe Diem (Sieze the Day) around the world, but the catchphrase in Sweden is Squeeze the Day!

Till next time!