The Feast of Valborg and May Day 

Valborgsmässoafton och Första Maj

Normally, Spring is already well established in the southern reaches of the country, while northerners will still have to wait a few weeks longer.  Nevertheless, this is the evening Swedes welcome in the Spring.  The holiday is especially celebrated in university communities.  In Uppsala, site of Sweden's oldest university, students gather by the thousands in the afternoon and don their white caps to mark the change of the seasons.  (Nowadays, students actually only wear these caps on the Feast of Valborg and at other student festivities.)  They listen to traditional hymns to the Spring and student songs, to speeches hailing the end of the dark, dank cold of winter and the return of the sun and summer greenery.  Many parties are held in the evening.  Similar traditions have grown up in Sweden's younger university towns, too.  In Lund, many of the festivities take place the day after, on the first day of May.

The rest of Sweden "sings in the Spring" in similar fashion, often around large community bonfires.  Once peculiar to the eastern part of the country, in recent decades the custom of building bonfires has spread throughout central Sweden.

The idea of the Feast of Valborg as the first day of Spring is perhaps most widespread in Swedish towns and cities, while Spring traditionally reaches the countryside the following day, especially in the south.