Laskiainen


Laskiainen is a celebration with Finnish origins, which includes both pagan and ecclesiastic traditions, and is often described as a "mid-winter sliding festival".
In clerical sense, Laskiainen is associated with Shrove Tuesday and is a celebration of the beginning of Lent that takes place before Easter. In Northern Europe, this tradition has been practiced from at least the 7th century onward, and in Catholic countries – in form of carnivals – even before that.
The traditions of Laskiainen consist largely of merrymaking and feasts. Food-items typically enjoyed in Finland in Laskiainen include in many cases pea-soup with ham, and cheeses. The best-known after-meal dessert of Laskiainen, often enjoyed either with coffee or tea, is Fat Tuesday Pulla – a.k.a. Shrove bun, or semla –, which is a sweet roll filled with almond-paste or strawberry jam, and whipped cream. In North America too, it is traditional in Laskiainen to have a meal of split-pea soup with ham, and for amusement – as in Finland – to slide down a hill on either snow-covered or iced tracks, often on toboggans.
One of the places where Laskiainen is celebrated outside Europe in form of an annual festival is the community of Palo, located between Aurora and Makinen on the shores of Loon Lake in Minnesota. With this celebration, Palo is the home for one of the longest continuously-held annual Finnish-American festivals in the United States, others being e.g. various Saint Urho's Day festivals held each March 16 both in Canada and the United States, and the FinnFest USA festivals, which have taken place in locations throughout the United States, typically hosted by communities with connections to Finnish-American cultural history.
Many Finnish-North-American groups and clubs host various Laskiainen celebrations, but the large one which developed and became more organized in Palo in the 1930s is notable for both its size and longevity.