Nikodemus Blog

Raw Fish, Schnapps, Maypoles, and the Frog Dance Everything You Need to Know for Celebrating a Proper Swedish Midsummer Swedes are not known for their loud and brazen ways, but for one summer day in the month of June they come together in an often unhinged celebration of the longest day of the year. I think it is the fact that the sun is only up for a few hours per day during the winter months that makes Swedes absolutely worship this day. And for some reason, in Sweden, the combination of raw, pickled herring and fine aquavit liquor seems to be the only worthy way of celebrating anything. The Swedish midsummer is no different. We consume tons and gallons of both, while wearing homemade garlands and singing the numerous traditional schnapps songs. The only time we take a break from the eating and drinking is to dance around a pole in the ground, hopping around like a herd of frogs. To Swedes, this all makes total sense. There are a lot of things that go into celebrating midsu...

Although I did not enjoy the second half of the book as much as the first, I still really liked Growing a Farmer. I think one of the reasons why I didn't appreciate the second part of the book as much was the fact that Timmermeister's writing became repetitive. The first couple of "how to" chapters were fine, but when they carried over into most of the second part of the book as well it just became too much. At times, I found myself skipping a paragraph or two just to get through those parts as quickly as possible, and that is not something I do very often. And as opposed to many in our class who thought the "The Slaughter" and "Butchering" chapters were disgusting and repulsive, I rather thought they were just plain boring. I am really glad that I stuck with the book until the end however, because the final chapter was great and definitely worth waiting for. Maybe the fact that I was sipping on my second glass of red wine at this point had so...