SHARE
COPY LINK
For members

CHRISTMAS

Advent Calendar 2022: The Swedish town where people sit on ice poles for 51 hours

In the next article of our 2022 Advent Calendar, we share the story of Wilhelmina, the town with a famous ice-pole-sitting competition.

Advent Calendar 2022: The Swedish town where people sit on ice poles for 51 hours
Would you dare to sit on a pole made of ice for 51 hours? Photo: Vilhelmina Tourist Center

If you’ve experienced a chilly backside from sitting at the bus stop or on a park bench this winter, spare a thought for those who partake in Sweden’s annual Ice Pole Sitting contest.

It is exactly what it sounds like.

Each February, people in the northern town of Wilhelmina brave the cold and dark by sitting atop 2.5-metre poles made of ice. Anyone who lasts the full length of time is a winner and gets an equal share of the 20,000 kronor prize money.

Traditionally the contest lasted 48 hours, but this was raised to 66 in 2018 before being cut back down to 51 in 2019.

The bizarre competition has been running since 1999, but 2013 was the coldest year so far, when temperatures dipped to almost -30C.

Other activities on offer at the Wilhelmina Winter Weekend include food and drink, musical performances, and ice sculptures to admire including an entire church which hosts wedding ceremonies. 

Not that the ice pole-sitters get to experience any of that, of course.

Food and drink is served to them according to a schedule, but apart from ten-minute breaks granted every three hours for toilet visits and stretching, they must spend the entire duration atop their frozen seats. And they can’t use their phones or any kind of digital entertainment. An extreme digital detox indeed.

The contest draws quite a crowd. Photo: Vilhelmina Tourist Center

CHRISTMAS IN SWEDEN:

Doctors are on hand and can require participants to drop out of the contest if their health is judged to be in danger. But northern Swedes are made of tough stuff; in 2019 all seven participants lasted the full 51 hours, which the city’s tourist information office said was the first time they could remember that no one had dropped out. And the contestants this year included one who had travelled from Texas just to take part.

After two years of cancelled festivals, the Wilhelmina Winter Weekend will be back in February 2023.

In 2023 the festival will be taking place between February 11th and 19th. One to add to your bucket list for the year?

Member comments

Log in here to leave a comment.
Become a Member to leave a comment.
For members

CHRISTMAS

Julmys: How to get into the Christmas spirit like a Swede

The First of Advent kicks of the Christmas season in Sweden. How do you get into the festive spirit like a Swede?

Julmys: How to get into the Christmas spirit like a Swede

Julmys, made up of the word jul (Christmas) and that famous Swedish word mys, roughly translating as “cosiness”, is not an event as such, more just getting your friends or family together to do some Christmassy activities and get into the Christmas spirit.

Usually you’ll have some sort of festive food and activity, like baking, making paper decorations for your Christmas tree, or decorating your Advent candlestick.

If you’re meeting up on one of the four Sundays in Advent, the four Sundays leading up to Christmas, you can call it adventsmys, but you can still do these activities on a normal day and just call it julmys instead.

What should I bake?

Obviously you can bake whatever you want, and this is a great opportunity to show off whatever kind of festive baking you do back home for big holidays, but if you want to do as the Swedes do, there are a few essential cakes and biscuits you should try around Christmas time.

The most easily recognisable biscuits are probably pepparkakor, the Swedish version of gingerbread, a spiced brown dough which is rolled out and cut into shapes before baking.

Pepparkaka literally translates as “pepper cake” – biscuits are known as småkakor or “small cakes” in Swedish – but in most cases pepper doesn’t refer to actual black pepper but rather to some kind of spiced dough, commonly flavoured with some combination of ingefära (ginger), kanel (cinnamon), kardemumma (cardamom) and nejlika (cloves).

READ ALSO:

You can buy pepparkaksdeg (gingerbread dough) in most supermarkets which you shape and bake yourself, but it’s relatively easy to make from scratch too. Some Swedes may balk at the idea of köpedeg (store-bought dough) – this is because there’s a little gnome who prefers everything homemade and traditional who lives inside them this time of the year, but it’s not socially unacceptable to buy ready-made.

You can also use the pepparkakor to make a gingerbread house (pepparkakshus).

Especially around Lucia on December 13th, Swedes also like to make lussekatter, saffron buns shaped like an S which is said to resemble a sleeping cat, hence the name “Lucia cats”. Warm, soft and sweet, they are at their best hot out of the oven. Enjoy them with a cup of glögg.

Many people also make knäck this time of the year, a kind of hard Swedish toffee. It’s tricky to get the consistency right – they should be hard when you first put them in your mouth, but quickly melt into a gooey softness as you begin to chew – so try to find an experienced Swede to teach you.

What about decorations?

OK, so you’ve got your Christmas snacks sorted – now onto the decorations!

One of the most common types of paper decorations you’re likely to see people making around Christmas is the julgranshjärta (Christmas tree hearts). You’ll need scissors, relatively thick paper in two different colours and a lot of patience. Here’s a useful guide to how to make them.

Another popular decoration is the smällkaramell – Christmas crackers. The Swedish version usually doesn’t go “crack!” like its English-language equivalent, but on the other hand they are very easy to make yourself.

You just get an empty toilet roll, roll it up in some pretty, thin paper and cut the edges of the paper into strips.

If you want, you can put a piece of candy inside before taping it shut, which you open at the julgransplundring when Christmas is over. But more often than not, Swedes will save their smällkarameller for future Christmasses.

Hopefully that’s given you some ideas for how to get into the Christmas spirit, Swedish style. Now all that’s left is to warm up a bottle of glögg and put on some Swedish julsånger. God jul!

SHOW COMMENTS