Friday, April 14, 2017

Good Friday or "Long Friday" rather

It's one of those things of translation and living in a new country. Today is "Friday before Easter", a day off work back in home country and called "Long Friday" [Långfredag]. Side note, it's called Good Friday here, which in itself has been confusing to me since "long" and "good" aren't directly translated....

Anyhow, when I moved to southern US, a much more religious place than my Swedish birth place, I hadn't really given all the holidays much of a thought "since I was moving to a more Christian place". I kinda thought the holidays were going to be similar, well at last the Christian derived ones that we have in Sweden - I didn't expect Midsummers you know. To this day my friends and family can't understand that I'm not having Good Friday off here. Here, where people seem to know the Bible a lot, when it is a state mandated holiday back home where people barely (or not at all) know what Easter is all about (apart from the Easter candy eggs*).

When I grew up this day was a boring one. Not only because the telly (all two channels of them) didn't show anything really fun. There were a church service and then possibly some animal shows or, I really don't know since I didn't watch TV during the day. My grand mother used to tell me that when she grew up there was no "running around, having fun, laughing or reading frivolous stuff". Well, at the time I grew up at least she'd eased up on the reading part. But no singing loudly outside.... (or hanging laundry for that matter).

My point today? That I would love to have had one of those boring days for today. A day when I couldn't do anything but sit still reading, sleeping in, taking it slow and just resting. Alas, since it is 2017 and I'm not in my birth country - I'm heading in to work to be an efficient worker bee before taking a good weekend. Happy working this long day before a weekend.

Glad Påsk y'all!



*next time I might write up that background since I still love Ostara and the old Greek mythology

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