Swedish Pop Culture 2012 - Advent

For being the most secularized country in the world (see “religion”), Sweden has a lot of religious holidays and traditions. They are mainly stripped of their original meaning and only kept in order to provide us with excused to party and/or hang out with family. Advent, which means arrival, I believe was created so we would have an excuse to teach school children how to memorize and recite poetry, as well as do arts and crafts. Every Sunday, starting four weeks before Christmas, we light another of the four candles on the advent candelabrum. If you are ever lucky enough to travel around Sweden in December or January, you will see something that looks like an upside-down V in almost every window. Those are electric candelabrum and counting them can be a fun game for the kids, if the DVD-player, iPad, iPhone and Gameboy are all out of batteries.