Whilst in Finland on travels or holiday you may notice that friends here, even good friends, don’t invite you to their house? You’re not alone. I have friends here I have known for five or six years whose homes I have never seen, let alone be invited for a meal.I guess it is just not part of the Finnish Culture or influences upon them as a people.
Whether this strikes you as weird beyond any perverse measure or not may depend on where you come from. In England much of our social life revolves around dinner parties. Typically one invites four or five people over, and then spends a week fretting over table settings, the correct way to produce a perfect risotto, and worry over whether the guests will bring enough wine.
English Dinner Parties
The Dinner Party
Those culinary challenged can always go with a ‘pot luck’ dinner in which each guest brings a plate of something, anything delicious, or even rely on the Indian Delhi takeaway store up the road.
In Finland this rarely happens. A Finn’s home is not so much his castle as his retreat, safe from marauding foreigners sent to clean out his wine rack. Being polite types, Finns will generally accept an invitation to your home to dine – they just won’t reciprocate.
Having lived here for 22 years now, I am not quite sure why English Peoples are so obsessed with ‘having people over ‘and arranging dinner parties.
Certainly the climate helps – barbeques are quick and easy to arrange, and all you really need is half a dead cow and a crate of lager. Evolving from that into refined evenings of French Champagnes,wines and Half or a Full Rack of Lamb has mirrored our passage from a country famous only for producing butter and wool to one better known for producing movies and promoting fashion.London now being one of the top centers for fashion design
But I think it is also because we are such relentlessly social people, functional only in large, loud and usually drunken groups that dinner parties have simply become the necessary epitome of our social lives. We would be lost without them.
Whether Finns will ever really develop a taste for dinner parties I don’t know. I suspect not, actually, given the famous Finnish cloistering around the family unit. But at least if not – inviting Finns out for a drink usually seems to please everyone.You have more chances of success at joining a Finnish Sauna evening and lounging beside a lake or relaxing in the Finns Garden
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This is something i hadn't given any thought to until I read this. You're right, in the 6 years I've been living in Finland I don't recall ever being invited to eat in someone's house other than the in-laws.
I've been given snacks a plenty, cakes, buns and biscuits until you just don't think you could face another and a few times, if I've been at a friends house around lunch time, i've been offered food but I've never received an invite to dine.
I'm wracking my brains now trying to think of a time…It can't be true, surely? But I think it may well be. Odd the things you don't notice until someone points them out to you.
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