Kristen K picture 2

Ed's Finnish Sauna

When the Finns came to America, they built saunas before they built houses. All over New England, from Massachusetts to Connecticut to New Hampshire, a sauna was always a part of Finnish people’s lives. My parents came here in the early 1900s, they bought a farm in Hubbardston, a small town in northern Massachusetts. We would start the fire mid-morning so that the rocks would be hot by evening. Every Friday or Saturday night we sat in the sauna, making steam by splashing water over the rocks. We hit our arms and legs with fresh birch branches (called “switches”) to clean the skin, to flush out all the poisons. Afterwards we would bathe in warm water. If there was a pond or a river nearby, some people would jump into the cold water to cool off, as you’ll see in the sauna I made.

My family’s sauna was a one-story building, unlike this sauna. The staircase is a very important part of the experience: the higher you sit, the hotter the air. Sometimes our Yankee neighbors would come over – they really enjoyed the sauna, trying to go as high up the stairs as they could.