Finnish quirk

I continue to be enchanted by Finnish traditions that pop up from time to time. They only seem to "pop up" because I didn't know about them beforehand, but that makes it all the more charming. This week, I was caught off guard by:

1. Pikkulaskiainen ("little sledding"). A bunch of my students made arrangements to miss my class tomorrow so they could go to this honest-to-goodness sledding festival. A SLEDDING FESTIVAL. It looks amazing, but a) it's during my class, obviously, so I can't go; b) the students said kids don't really come to watch, because c) my kids will probably have their own pikkulaskiainen at their own school. WHAT.

2. Associated with the above is laskiaispullat - sledding pulla (sweetbread). They were handing them out for free in Educarium today and they looked even better than the ones in the photo here. Sweetbread + cream + jam/almonds = this is a holiday food I can get behind.

3. Numbers 1 and 2 are somehow connected to Shrove Tuesday. I can kind of see how crazy sledding and decadent buns fit into the pre-Lent scene, but the exact relationship is not clear to me.

4. There was a famous Finnish poet named Runeberg, and his birthday is on Friday, and in honor of that, people eat a special kind of cake called Runeberg torte. I approve of this holiday. I love food-based traditions.