Ah, the first of May. It's traditionally a workers day, but in Finland it's also become a day for students. I could post a bunch of traditional Finnish "Vappu" (The Finnish holiday on 1st of May) including "Sima" (mead) and "Munkit" (doughnuts), but I've just added one photo of doughnuts to attract you to enter the post.
I'll describe you what kind of celebration Vappu is in Finland, as Finns rarely celebrate by going out at all. They rather stay indoors and drink as much as they can. Vappu also includes this, people go outside and drink as much as they can.
This is typically done a day before Vappu as Vappu is the day off from work. You need to sober up during Vappu, so you can go back to work after that.
But during Vappu day there are typically quite many people going outside, mostly because there are people going outside.
One of my personal favorite activities are the "Old cars parade" in some towns, where people drive through the town in a long line through the town. In the city I visited there was approximately 150+ old cars driving through the city and I was lucky enough to get photos of some of them.
I chose a bit of different kinds of cars seen on the parade, while not all of them were special in any way, it was a really nice event. People work on their old cars for months just to enjoy them in the short Finnish summer and people show their respect to them by coming to see them on days like this.
Besides the cars, typically they have these "Vappumarkkinat", which translates to "Vappu fair" or "First of the May fair"? Typically there is nothing interesting in the fair, as people are selling the same stuff they are selling in every occasion. However, as all Finns tend to go to these "Vappumarkkinat", they go outside just to see people they know.
The interactions themselves might be limited to a nod and "Hello", but this is one of the situations where you can see people you don't typically see in your life. You might see long lost friends, family members you haven't seen in years or your husband, long lost at sea.
All the photos I took from the Vappu fair have so many people I don't want to start editing everyone to be unrecognizable, so I'll just add a photo of food.
We had really nice tasting pancakes, which were made on huge pans in the crowd. We had to wait in the queue for a long time, even though they were using 7 pans to fry the pancakes, but people were crazy about those.
The day was cold so warm pancakes made the world seem a bit better.
The best Vappu tradition is the weather: cold, wind and rain.