Are You Celebrating Lillördag Yet?

Photo by Aleksandr Ledogorov on Unsplash

Project 365, Day 174/365

Happy Wednesday, a.k.a. lillördag! If you don’t know what word you just read, I wrote about it way back in February. Since then, about 98% of all Wednesdays have been spent in a lillördag state of mind. Because to Charles and me, that’s what it is.

Quick recap if you still don’t know what it is and don’t feel like going to read about it in another post (fine, make me do the work, why don’t you): Lillördag is Swedish for “Little Saturday” and is a Nordic practice in which a weekday is treated like a reason to celebrate as you would on Saturday—typically Wednesday. Us Americans have a far more charming name for it: hump day. ::eye roll::

While our choice of activity waffled around the first few weeks…months, we’ve kind of settled into a routine that I look forward to every week: finish work close to on time, head to the beach to watch the sunset, come back home and trade duties: one week I pick a movie to watch while Charles picks what we eat for dinner, the next week, we swap. Though to be honest, Charles never knows what to eat and I usually end up picking anyway because he’d eat a rock if you put it on a plate in front of him. It’s my happy place. Occasionally, we’ll pop into a coffee shop in the morning to grab breakfast.

The idea being to step away from the mundaneness of the week, and do something you’d typically reserve for the weekend. Why do we wait five days to do something nice for yourselves? Why do we wait five days to live? Sometimes, when the week is really good, we’ll let lillördag seep into other days, even if just little parts of it. I have to say, lillördag got us through the pandemic. When nothing was good, lillördag always was. When we felt cooped up, lillördag freed us. When I was having a bad body day, lillördag lifted me up. It was a free pass to let go of certain responsibilities (cooking, for instance) and cut myself/ourselves a break.

There’s so much more I can say about our 5-month-long lillördag practice, and probably should as this is quite a short post, but it’s nearing midnight and I have an early appointment tomorrow, so I’m going to leave it here.

If you haven’t introduced lillördag into your weekly routine, watcha waiting for? Find your lillördag vibes, whatever they are (maybe it’s a day you take a long bath, or the day you decide to do an in-depth skincare routine, of the day you decide to have some ice cream, or the day you decide to have a phone date—or real date—with a friend, or the day you want to eat a bowl of macaroni and cheese in bed while watching a guilty pleasure show…). I promise, it might be the best thing you’ve done for the doldrums of life in a very long time.

See you tomorrow, FOAS.