Midsummer

Midsummer is a celebration of the season of summer usually held at a date around the summer solstice. It has pagan pre-Christian roots in Europe. The early Christian Church designated June 24 as the feast day of the early Christian martyr St John the Baptist, and the observance of St John's Day begins the evening before, known as Saint John's Eve. These are commemorated by many Christian denominations, such as the Roman Catholic Church, Lutheran Churches, and Anglican Communion, as well as by freemasonry. In Sweden, the Midsummer is such an important festivity that there have been proposals to make the Midsummer's Eve the National Day of Sweden, instead of June 6. In Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, Midsummer's festival is a public holiday. In Denmark and Norway, it may also be referred to as St. Hans Day. Studies of culturally important phenomena in the sky indicate the timing of the summer solstice has been observed since the Neolithic era, with many ancient monuments in Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and the Americas aligned with sunrise or sunset on the summer solstice. The name 'midsummer' is attested in Old English as midsumor, and refers to the time around the summer solstice. Astronomically, the solstice falls on 21 June, but traditionally in northern Europe the solstice and midsummer was reckoned as the night of 23–24 June, with summer beginning on May Day. Likewise, in the ancient Roman world, the traditional date of the summer solstice was 24 June, and Marcus Terentius Varro wrote in the 1st century BC that Romans saw this as the middle of summer. In the city of Rome, it was the festival of the goddess Fors Fortuna. People thronged the River Tiber and rowed in boats to the temples of Fortuna; "after undisclosed rituals they rowed back, garlanded and inebriated". In the 4th century AD, the undivided Christian Church made 24 June the feast day of Saint John the Baptist; it marks his birth, which the Gospel of Luke says was six months before Jesus.