This is an essay I wrote for the student yearbook when I was the principal of the Hunter College Elementary School in New York City. © Jane Piirto. All Rights Reserved.

For the last two years, along with reminding you to study hard in school, and not to run in the halls,  and to read good books, and to be kind to others, and to do your homework, I have told a story about growing up in Ishpeming, Michigan, a town of 8,000 in the Upper Peninsula.

            This year I am going to tell you another story about growing up, and this story will be about taking a bath. “Taking a bath?” you ask. Yes. This is a story about how we took a bath when I was growing up.

My grandparents were immigrants from Finland, and in the basement of their big, rambling house, where they had raised twelve children, was the sauna.  This is the Finnish bath.  Many people have saunas back where I come from— little cabins out in back of the house, little rooms in the basement.  These are not the kind of sauna you get at the Holiday Inn or health club, either.

            Every Saturday, one of my uncles would go over to Grandma’s house late in the afternoon to warm the sauna, putting wood scraps into the sauna stove, filling the water tank, lighting the fire.  My father made sauna stoves as a small business, and he had made this one at Grandma’s house, welding it and shaping it to get the most heat.

            The sauna room, besides the stove, which had many smooth rocks on top of it in order to make steam, had the water tank, and a bench with two levels.  There was also a faucet and a shower.  It was a small sauna room, lit by one light bulb shining through a small glass window in the changing room.  It was painted white with orange trim.  The floor was cold cement.

            When all was prepared down in the sauna room, the cousins, uncles, and aunts would start arriving from neighboring towns.  Neighbors who didn’t own saunas would come over.  Sauna night, Saturday night, was the most fun of our whole week.  We are about thirty-five first cousins, and many of us showed up on Saturday at Grandma’s to take a bath in the family sauna.

            Small children would go with their mothers and fathers to the sauna, but when we got old enough to wash ourselves and do a good job, we were allowed to go with our cousins. The girl cousins would take a sauna together, and the boy cousins would play outside, and then the boy cousins would go.  Sometimes all the aunts went in the sauna together, to gossip and catch up on the news, and sometimes all the uncles would go together, to drink some beer and to tell jokes.  Taking a sauna bath with your friends or cousins or relatives was, and is, a lot of fun.

            To take a sauna, you first have to fill your pail with water that is just the right temperature for your feet, because you put your feet in the bucket while you wash yourself with your washcloth.  Your washcloth is also good for dipping in cold water when the oldest or the bravest of you throws water in a ladle onto the hot rocks, making them steam.  You sit and steam up and throw water on the rocks for awhile, having contests to see who can take it the hottest.  Finnish men especially like to do this.  Sissies are those who have to run out and get a breath of cold air.  Our cousins from Lower Michigan, who only came to Grandma’s once a year, were often sissies.        

            In summer, you can run and jump in the lake, and sometimes, in winter, you roll in the snow.  One Christmas Eve we all made “bun prints” at my uncle’s farm, where he has a very old sauna, a savu sauna, smoke sauna.   Your body is so hot you don’t even feel the cold for a few moments, and when you do, you go back into the sauna to steam up again.

            After you have had enough steam, you begin washing.  You pour buckets of water over your head and wash your hair.  You soap up your cousin’s back.  You get more and more pails of water.  If you want to, you can steam up again, and then wash up again.  Then, when you’ve had enough steam and soap and water, you take a shower and go out to the changing room where your parents have put clean underwear and talcum power into the family’s sauna bag, along with the rough clean towels that smell air fresh from being hung outside on the clothesline.

            The grownups, when they took sauna, often used “vihta,” which were birch branches tied in bundles and soaked in water, to slap themselves on the back, in order to help the circulation.  We girl cousins didn’t think it sounded like fun to hit ourselves with leaves and twigs–we were too modern–so we didn’t use the vihtas, but they were always there.

            After we had dressed up and combed our wet tangled hair, letting it air-dry before we put it back in braids, we went upstairs to the eating kitchen (next to the cooking kitchen) and were we hungry, after all that steam, and water, and giggling together. We sat down and on the table, piles of cookies, plates of cakes, coffee bread, cold cuts, cheese, and sandwich makings waited.  We were allowed to have a glass of orange pop, too.  You New York City children call it soda.

            Then we went back out to play, and when our parents had finished taking their saunas, and when we had run and laughed and shouted and explored Grandma’s big house, rattling her china cabinet with our running, climbing in stockinged feet up the slippery narrow steps into the attic where our weird uncle slept, we went back home to the Three C’s:  Clean pajamas, Clean sheets, Clean bodies.

            That was how it was when the Finnish-American  families took their saunas at Grandma’s house on Saturday nights when I was growing up in the 1940s.  By the way, you pronounce “sauna” so that it rhymes with “sow“ (a female pig) and not with “ah.”  Just ask your Finnish-American principal to help you pronounce it right.