The Summer Guests

"I always knew the summer had begun when the summer guests started arriving", my mother told me some time ago. "They would walk to our house from their summer cottages. The house was always full in the summer. They started arriving in May and the last ones left in September." We were driving by the said summer cottage that's been empty all winter now and I was thinking summer is absolutely the best time to be in Finland. See, everyone else is here, too. Even when I was a child I also knew it was summer when my godparents came home from Sweden.

In East Asia people always try to get home for the lunar new year. Summer is our lunar new year. Most Finns who left the country to work abroad try to return in the summer. My home town is in Eastern Finland, it was one of the areas that lost a lot of young people in 60's and 70's when they mass emigrated to Sweden to work for the growing industrial sector, or went to work in the bigger cities elsewhere in Finland. My home town was pretty much empty in the winter but in the summer it filled with people, filled with life when the summer guests arrived. In the summer Finland is one, big, open guest house. We meet people we haven't seen in a year.

We call this Midsummer Rose because it's supposed to blossom around the time of  midsummer 

Of course Finns travel in the winter too, for Christmas and New Year's holidays and such but traveling in the summer has one advantage over everything else; traveling is easy. It's warm and it's daylight throughout the night. In addition people mostly take their longest vacation in the summer. There is plenty to see, too. Some small, local places like restaurants and cafes in Finland are only open in the summer. I invite you to come to Finland in the summer. We are ready to receive more guests!