The Torch Doesn't Light Itself
This past weekend we celebrated Jaanipäev (St. John's Day), the summer solstice, the longest day of the year and one of the biggest holidays in the Nordic calendar.
Long before anyone called it St. John's Day, it was simply Midsummer. A pagan celebration that stretched across ancient Europe, from Britain to Ukraine, marking the longest day / shortest night of the year, depending on who you asked.
When Christianity arrived, it didn't so much erase the old holiday as rename it: Midsummer fell close enough to the feast of John the Baptist that the two merged, and across the continent, Midsummer became St. John's Day.
But the new name was mostly a coat of paint. A sixteenth-century Estonian chronicler wrote with some disgust about countrymen who valued the feast more than church. Who showed up, didn't go inside, and spent the day lighting bonfires, drinking, dancing, and singing instead.
In Estonia, the day carries even more weight than that. Jaanipäev once marked the hinge of the agricultural year. The close of spring planting and the start of summer haymaking, which is why so many of its rituals run so deep.
The signature one is the bonfire. Building it big , since the failure to light one at all was thought to invite the very fire it was supposed to prevent.
And in 1919, the holiday picked up a second meaning: Estonian forces beat back the Germans during the War of Independence on June 23rd, and ever since, Jaanipäev has shared the calendar with Victory Day. So the fire isn't just for luck anymore. It's for everything the country fought to keep.
While this year marked my daughter's first, I've been going for thirty-five years, and it's still one of my favorite days of the year.
We may not be in Estonia, but we stubbornly celebrate like we are. We run around outside, we swim, we grill, we sing and dance, we take sauna, we have a few drinks, and we build a fire the moon could see just fine.
This year had a few new headliners, but the bones of it never change, and that's the whole point.
Some of the people there this year watched me grow up. Knew me when I was in single digits, or not yet born at all. That's part of what I love most.
We've taken a Nordic tradition and kept it alive here in the United States, the same way my ancestors kept it alive for centuries before anyone thought to write it down.
Traditions are just agreements. Quiet ones, made without a handshake, to keep showing up and doing the damn thing the way our people always have.
And showing up is the whole trick. Traditions don't work long-distance. Neither do friendships. They need a body in the room.
That's why I think traditions are load-bearing walls for belonging. Both ask the same price of you: commitment, and showing up.
Take those away and you don't have culture, you have nostalgia. A postcard instead of the place.
Without them, we're rudderless, drifting on a calendar with no milestones to mark the way.
I love this tradition because I love what lies beneath it: my Estonian roots, my upbringing, my values, and a small village of people I grew up alongside and still get to call my people.
The traditions are the reason we gather, month on month, year on year. The lights strung along the road, so you always know you're getting somewhere. And somewhere along the way, without either of us announcing it, my wife became one of those lights too. Not a guest at the tradition anymore. A carrier of it.
Now there's a third light. My daughter's first Jaanipäev was the start of her own, even if it's too early to know what it'll mean to her yet. What I do know is she loves being outdoors, and she was born into a field full of fire and noise and people who already loved her before she could love them back. The tradition didn't skip a generation. It just picked up a new one.
But here's the thing about a tradition like this ... somebody has to carry it.
The Estonians who built that fire in 1578 are long gone, and the ones who beat back an army in 1919 are gone too, and the only reason any of it survived to land on a field in America last Saturday is because somebody, every single year, agreed to keep showing up and doing the thing.
That's not nostalgia, that's a relay race, where the torch doesn't stay lit on its own.
So if you've got a tradition like mine. One with roots. One with a village attached to it. Go stand in that field. Don't let it go quiet on your watch.
And if you don't have one, if there's no village waiting for you with a fire already built, that's not a verdict, it's an assignment.
Go find it. Ask around, show up uninvited if you have to, try on a few traditions that aren't yours yet until one of them fits like it always was.
Somewhere out there is a little village with your name on it, and once you find it, it'll light up your world the same way that bonfire lit up the field on Saturday night. And it'll keep doing it, year after year, for as long as you keep showing up.