#swedengate

[yourlocalbadgerscales]

omg y’all let me introduce you to this new concept called SWEDENGATE ✨😍😍😍🥰🥰✌️✌️✌️✌️😀🎀🎀🎀🎀🎀✨✨

This is the Swedish flag. Notice anything special about it…?

… that’s rIGHT, IT’S BLUE AND YELLOW 😍🤩🤩

This theory suggests that Mike and Will are actually two Swedish boys called Mikael “Micke” Wahlberg and Villiam ”Ville” Boman, but Vecna fucked up their minds and memories and now they no longer remember their lives in Sweden 😣 AT ALL

In s5 I sure hope to see a scene where they’re dancing around the midsommarstång together while singing at the top of their lungs 🥰 Also they celebrate their first Lucia together

[onaa-ohokthen]

Alright, as heard of/remember swedengate, right? Someone posted about how as a kid, they waited in their friend's room while the family ate dinner. Cue, a country of stingy assholes who should be shot, how dare you not stuff six servings of food info any child that goes within a mile of your house that's what we do in my country you are WRONG, outrage etc. So what's going on?

As someone born in the mid-80s, I have definitely experienced this and find it completely normal. I can also say, after asking around, that it's not really a thing anymore, for reasons that will become obvious. 

Ok. So why is this happening and why aren't Swedes "feeding their guests" ?

1: In these cases, children aren't really guests: Guests are invited ahead of time, and you know they're there. Unlike in the US, where distances and social norms seem to have required play dates from pretty early on, kids in the sixties through nineties moved really independently. Often you would just show up, either after stopping by your own home or just joining your friend on the way home from school. You, much less your friend's parents, wouldn't know ahead of time that you were going to be around.

2: Family structures where both parents worked: Women joined the work force earlier and to a greater extent in Sweden compared both to the US and the rest of Europe (for a number of reasons, not the least a population decline forcing the state to offer more generous parental leave), so it was likely that both of your parents worked away from home. Smaller children may be in after-school daycare, but latchkey kids were numerous. You couldn't call your mom and ask if you could eat at your friend's house, because she was at work, or on her way home, and already had dinner planned. Both parents working also meant that dinner may be the only time on weekdays the whole family was sitting down in one space and spending time together. 

3: A history of poverty and self sufficiency: Sweden is wealthy now, but that has only been true since after WWI. Historically, there was a very real pride in one's own independence and ability to feed one's own family - to feed someone else's child dinner was insulting to them, since you were implying they weren't capable. Also, you now owed them one (there's an interesting reason behind this too, which involves both religion and land reform, but it would be a giant digression.) 

4 Food Culture: Swedes tend to eat a cold (as in not cooked) breakfast of soft or hard bread with toppings like cheese, boiled eggs, or lunch meats, and yogurt or fermented milk with cereal of some kind, etc. Lunch tends to be warm/cooked. Restaurants are often open for lunch, serving "dagens rätt" (today's dish), one or two options of a main course, a drink, coffee, and a salad bar, at a set price. Employers used to offer "lunch coupons" as part of benefits, which could be used to pay for it. In the days prior to the microwave (and it didn't become common until the late 80s), leftovers for lunch was not really a thing for the average office worker. When you cooked dinner, you made exactly the amount your family was going to eat, no more and no less.

So imagine you're an 80s parent. You and your spouse work until 5, pick up groceries on the way home and cook a pre-planned dinner. You're going to sit down, all of the family, and eat and hear about everyone's day. And then your kid comes home and tells you they already ate at their friend's house? Wouldn't you be irritated? At both your kid and at their friend's parents? 

The unwillingness to feed other people kids was out of respect for their parents and their own dinner setup.

"Ok, but if your friend was going to eat, why didn't you just go home?" That was an option! Usually an undesirable option, because if you paid the price of waiting for 20 minutes, you could buy another half an hour, or even hour, of play time, depending on your parents' hours and commute. Once you left and went home, play time was over and you had ceded fun for the day.

So Swedes never feed people who are at their house? Of course they do. In high school, my best friend's commute was 30-45 minutes in the opposite direction of mine, so we couldn't hang spontaneously. We would join the other on the train home on Fridays and spend the night. Since it was pre-planned, we ate dinner as well as breakfast at each other's houses. When I was younger, planned events such as sleepovers obviously involved food.

And, of course, there's fika. Fika is coffee (lemonade for the children) and baked goods (cinnamon buns or cookies or maybe small sandwiches) and can be had at almost any time other than before breakfast. Everyone always has coffee, the lemonade is bought or made as a syrup, and buns or cookies can be warned up from the freezer in minutes. Fika is small enough not to prevent you from having dinner later, or at least provide plausible deniability, and doesn't require planning. Everyone is invited for fika, even if they happened to stop by when everyone was already eating. In the summers, when we had fika outdoors, the neighbors were invited (by means of shouting) just because they happened to be out in their garden, within visual range.

In the 2020s, children don't roam quite as freely, cell phones mean that they can access their parents before dinner is already made, and microwaves in lunch rooms mean that dinners have to be less precisely planned. As a consequence, the dinner wait isn't nearly as common anymore. But it was never that strange. 

[vizzly-sama]

You leave cookies and milk for Santa.

In Sweden we just throw some candy on the trash bin...

[deepjuillet]

Swedengate: Why Do The World Need to Be Conformist?

What cultural impact will this event have on the Swedes? Will they still be proud and carry on with their age-old practices? Or will they remember the fiasco that perhaps lasted a week and start changing their habits?

I often think that we now live in an era where people are quick to react to every snippet of news they hear as if it’s the sole purpose of their social existence. And the time it took them to access and share that information, they forget about them in about the same amount of time. Yet, this reminds me of the old allegorical tale that circulated on the net around the beginning of this century,…

[shortgremlinman]

Stranger things saying Sweden was a bad place was so ahead of its time

[arcticdementor]

(link)

[apparentlynotreallyfinnish]

Since they got into it in GMMore here are my thoughts on the feeding other people’s kids debate. Finland has a similar dinner culture.

If a kid comes over for a sleepover, yes, you feed them both dinner and breakfast (unless they come so late they’ve already had dinner at home).

If a kid is just over after school, no, you don’t feed them dinner. Why? There are multiple reasons:

1. It’s about respect to that kid’s parents. They are making him dinner and if you fed the kid their efforts would go to waste.

2. You may not know about their allergies or dietary restrictions.

3. It’s a low key insult to the parents: “you can’t afford to feed your child”.

4. More often than not I make just enough food for my family. There would be no left to offer for someone else.

If a kid comes over to me and says they are hungry I will offer a fruit or a sandwich. I will also always offer a drink (juice or water). If I knew a kid had trouble at home and was not properly fed I would feed them dinner.

It’s a cultural thing. It’s not rude.

[marikabi]

Finale di stagione. Un po’ di tutto. Ci vediamo in autunno

[magicaleurovision]

Okay europals, I actually met a Swedish guy who FED ME, cooked for me,l and all, so I guess that Sweden-bashing is over on this site, ende, no more!

(And yes, I did give him the “swedes don’t feed their guests” joke. Of course I did. It may have been one of the first things I said too. That’s too good not to be used with every Swede I meet, till I get blacklisted from ever going there. So I guess he might have felt tempted to prove me wrong or maybe he just liked my boobs and thought that giving me food would make him get closer to them idk)

I may also have used the fact that I voted for Måns back in 2015 as a flirting technique

[therealvinelle]

I think that it's just a cultural difference. I'm from LatAm and here it is unconceivable to not offer anything to a guest. My mom will offer water even to the mailman, even if we have only one glass of water, because we are taught that our guests are always the priority. Some older people even get offended if you do not eat anything in their houses. They WANT you to eat something, to refuse is perceived as bad manners. It's just the way things are here. In general, friendliness and kindness are perceived as more important than politeness.

I completely forgot about this ask, sorry!

This is concerning Swedengate. Previous posts.

[mircalla]

Maybe Swedes can't feed their guests because Norwegians bought all the groceries. This phenomenon is called harrytur, which roughly translates to tacky trip

[inprogress-predicament]

A take on the Sweden feeding guests controversy.

My paternal grandma feeds everyone who comes into her home because she was near starved several times in her life and she does what she can to make sure no one else goes through that.

My maternal grandma watched her mother trade food, coupons and child care with the neighborhood wives, sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly. A kind of "I feed your kids this week cause you're short on groceries and if I'm ever short you'll feed mine" agreement. She feeds everyone because she fosters good, caring relationships with everyone she can.

Not to mention other familial traditions I haven't even noticed.

My parents raised me with a mix of their parents generosity styles. Generosity that was formed by extreme poverty and hardship in the last few generations. In middle class White communities I've noticed a bit of the freely offered gifts for guests traditions dying out during my life time. It hasn't died out in hard hit communities.

Sweden hasn't had a genuine supply/life/food crisis in recent history. They were neutral in WII, had a four year housing crisis on the 90's, and have been one of the richest countries in the world since the mid 1900s. I dont know if the Swedish people know how to suffer.

[apas-95]

You being racist against the dutch (/s) finally made me understand why "going Dutch" (ie everyone covers their own expenses on an outing) is an expression. Took me, what, a week or two to connect those dots, but I did it!

[doctorstarlock]

The internet the last couple weeks:

[arcticdementor]

(link)

[magicaleurovision]

The Venn diagram of Swedes who don’t like/watch Eurovision and who don’t feed their guests is a circle.