The 1st of May is Vappu, which in Finland means student caps, sima (a lightly fermented lemon drink — think sparkling lemonade with ambition), munkki (sugar-dusted donuts), picnics in the park, and a general declaration that spring has arrived, whether or not the weather agrees.

I’ve lived here for sixteen years, and I still don’t fully get it.

Don’t misunderstand — I like Vappu fine. My son wants cute animal balloons. I get to stockpile flavored meads. There are donuts. These are good things. But the actual feeling of the holiday hasn’t sunk in the way it clearly has for people who grew up here.

The student cap thing, especially. Those white sailor caps come out without fail each year — people who graduated decades ago still wear them, treasure them, and treat high school graduation as a genuine milestone worth commemorating. And I understand it intellectually: Finnish lukio (upper secondary school) is rigorous. The ylioppilastutkinto (matriculation exam) is hard. Graduation represents an academic path you deliberately chose when you could have gone the trade school route instead. The white cap means something.

But I’m from California, where finishing high school is required by law. We had a ceremony. We wore robes. I have a mortarboard somewhere in a box. It has never once occurred to me to put it on and go to a park.

I thought about digging it out once, for the amusement value alone. But walking around with a mortarboard is logistically much harder than a sailor cap — they’re not designed for outdoor picnics in variable weather. Also, I’d have to explain it constantly. Also, it would be weird.

I went looking for old Vappu photos for this post. In sixteen years, I don’t have a single one. I was always doing something else — once I was working on a film in London, once my parents were visiting. Vappu kept happening and I kept being elsewhere, literally or mentally.

So I took some.

The sima on my in-laws’ table is homemade — the real thing, fizzy and golden with that slight fermented edge. The munkki are baked now; my mother-in-law used to fry them the old-fashioned way, but I think she’s over it. The cake is a standard Finnish cream cake: two layers of white sponge with strawberry jam in the middle, whipped cream on the outside, fruit on top. This is what the holiday looks like when you show up.

And I do show up. I eat the donuts. I drink the mead — homemade at their table, store-bought berry version at mine. My husband wears his cap. My son gets his balloon. I appreciate the day off.

I just don’t feel the thing everyone else seems to feel. Maybe that’s fine. Maybe some holidays don’t translate, no matter how long you’ve lived somewhere. The expat experience includes a lot of participation without full absorption — going through the motions, enjoying the donuts, never quite reaching the part where it feels like yours.

At least there are flavored meads. That part I understand perfectly.