In Finland, the Christmas sauna has been a tradition for longer than Christianity has existed. Today, millions of saunas are heated throughout the land on Christmas Eve for the population to enjoy. In the book Christmas in Finland, the authors estimate that 70% of the population of Finland will enjoy a joulusauna on Christmas Eve. Many of Finland’s public saunas even have special Christmas Eve and Christmas Day hours for their patrons who don’t have their own sauna.
The sauna in Finland is not just a place of refuge and relaxation. It is a bath. So the Christmas sauna has a practical purpose. With Christmas celebrated at the winter solstice, close to the new year and symbolized with the birth of Christ, it is the perfect time to cleanse your body to symbolize that rebirth. In Finland, the sauna is the preferred place to bathe yourself. The temperature in Helsinki rarely gets above freezing this time of year, so having a nice hot place to bathe can help get the chill from your bones.
While the sauna is heating, many capture those kilowatts by cooking in it. Two Finnish-Canadian women published The Sauna Cookbook a few years ago with recipes for both enjoying while you sauna and cooking in the sauna. Another Finnish-Canadian, Sauna Pekka reminisces about a Christmas dinner of his youth:
At Christmas time in Finland we bake a 12 kg (26 lb) ham “kinkku” in the equivalent of 100°C (212°F) sauna heat for eight hours. For the ham we do not pour löyly, as it cooks better without it. When I sit in North American dry heat saunas, the poor ham comes always in my mind.
Christmas is a more recent invention than the sauna. Christmas came to Finland about 700 years ago. When Christmas arrived, it took on some of the existing midwinter celebrations that had existed for thousands of years before. Throughout much of Scandinavia, the old beliefs held that on the night of midwinter, the dead returned to walk the earth. Many still keep the sauna warm and throw another ladle of water on the rocks to make it comfortable for when your ancestors, elves and gnomes visit.
Modern health practitioners caution that you should not take a sauna too close to a large feast like that eaten on Christmas eve. They caution that you should use the sauna in the afternoon. However, people who know Finnish folklore understand that after dark, the sauna is reserved for the dead. Some say the devil himself walks the earth to find a sauna to bathe in at midnight on the winter solstice.
Other old beliefs say that the midwinter celebration is a time to thank the gods for the past season’s bountiful harvest and ask them for a fertile growing season in the spring. Some believe that throwing beer on the sauna stove helped appease these gods.
If you can, heat up your sauna this Christmas (or whichever winter holiday you celebrate). May it bring you peace, luck and a good harvest in the new year.
Glenn over at Sauna Times posted on this topic yesterday and said there are two ways to throw water on the rocks: Soft and softer. I’m a person who thrives on hard numbers, so this got me thinking.
The photo with this post is of the interior of a pretty typical sauna and heater you will find at most US hotels, clubs and gyms. It shows a Scandia heater made by Am-Finn Sauna and Steam in Eagle, Idaho. According to their website, they are the preferred vendor for the YMCA, Bally, Gold’s Gym and LA Fitness, most universities and the US Government. In my experience, they are right. Most public saunas in the USA use their brand of heater.
This heater has a shallow pan at the top to hold the rocks which prevents water from getting on the elements. Their website validates what Clint says: users can “pour water on the rocks without risk to the heater elements and control wiring.”
These heaters have an internal thermostat that limits their temperature to 190°F (88°C) in the wiring box. Looking at the way these are made, my guess is that the rock pan gets to somewhere around 250-300ºF (120-150°C). (I’ll have to figure out a way to look natural bringing my IR thermometer into the sauna with me the next time I go to the gym).
My guess is there are between 25 and 35 pounds of rock in these heaters. Mikkel Aaland says that hornblende is one of the preferred sauna rocks. A few trips to the engineering toolbox, and we find that we’ve got between 200 and 650 BTU to dissipate. A few more trips there and we find that means we can vaporize between 3 and 9 ounces of water before the rocks get too cold to do their job anymore.
In my experience, 4 ounces or 1/2 cup, seems to be the practical limit. That wood sauna ladle in the photo holds about 7 ounces of water.
So when you are in that hotel sauna, about 1/2 a ladle or 1/2 a small foam coffee cup is all you can put on the rocks at a time. Any more than that, and you’ll just cool off the stove.
With the power in those sauna stoves and their element designs, you can probably splash water on the rocks about once every 5-10 minutes, giving you a reason to use that sauna timer.
Compare that to a similar size heater made by Harvia in Finland. These hold about 130 lb of rocks and do not limit the temperature of the stove. They control only by the temperature of the sauna room, and the rocks touch the heating elements so they can get hotter.
Or look at the stove in a Russian banya. These stoves hold 10 or more tons of rock and heat them to more than 800°F! Russian banya enthusiasts say that this high temperature gives the best steam.
Stay tuned for a future post where we look at what happens when you throw water on those sauna rocks.
The app lets you enjoy an authentic sauna wherever you are: You can throw water on the rocks, whisk yourself with a vihta, or even drink a virtual glass of Finnish beer, all from within the handy interface. Now that you can sauna anywhere, make sure you don’t get carried away while you’re enjoying the virtual löyly.
In our quest to find new and interesting sauna tidbits to share with you, we spend a lot of time combing the web looking for information.
This weekend, we stumbled upon Sauna Times, a blog run by Glenn, a “Joe American” living in Minnesota. We find the similarities between his site and ours uncanny, right down to the choice of the background images. He seems to be quite a personable fellow. So much so that with this post, Sauna times now has a place in our links page.
What really caught our attention on his site though, was his post “Hotel Sauna: How to Take One.” A laminated copy now resides in our briefcase for our next stay at a hotel with a sauna.
We have noticed that most hotel (and health club) saunas, especially here in the USA, tend to be overly dry from disuse. This becomes part of the problem: If the sauna is dry and hot, it irritates your respiratory system. Most forbid you from throwing water on the rocks, so the only solution is to turn the temperature down. You end up sitting in a warm room, which really doesn’t do much for you.
Sauna Times has a simple solution for all of this: As soon as you check in, turn on the sauna full blast. Give it 20 minutes or so to heat, then:
Flush the hotel sauna. Generously douse with fresh water:
the bench area where you’ll be sitting.
the hotel sauna rocks with water (they should bark back, if not, the sauna is lame, call housekeeping if you’re especially irritated).
anywhere else you feel the urge.
Why? underused hotel saunas can build up dust and stagnation, this ‘cleansing’ will get your hotel sauna fresh and ready to rock.
After this, reset the timer again, and give the sauna another 30 minutes to recover from this washing, and you’re ready to begin the sauna process, which Glenn distills succinctly: “It’s like the instructions on a box of laundry detergent: sauna, rinse, chill, repeat.”
If you are looking for a lodging with a sauna, don’t forget to check out our hotel sauna search engine.
Nokia Löyly showing the conditions the new Nokia 5800 Sauna Edition is enduring from AllAboutSybian.com
For those of us addicted both to our sauna and our smartphone, Nokia today announced the release of their 5800 Sauna Edition today. AllAboutSybian.com broke the story earlier today. They interviewed Dr. Huhtikuun Ensimmäinen of Nokia’s Consumer Innovations Unit who said:
So, here we have the 5800 Sauna Edition, heat resistant up to 120 degrees celsius and able to work without problems in a typical sauna humidity. We have included a thermometer/hygrometer application so you can follow the progress of your sauna, but the real innovation here is our work on the casing. The Sauna Edition’s casing is coated with a special organically-derived plastic which allows radio signals to move unimpeded but blocks 99.99% of all humidity from entering.
Dr. Ensimmäinen expects the device to be popular in the Nordic regions, central Europe, and Russia. They believe a niche product like this would have a market to sauna enthusiasts worldwide, including us in North America.
AllAboutSybian.com found that the specialized thermo-hygrometer application bundled with the phone, Nokia Löyly reported accurate temperatures, and since most saunas are dimly lit, “a backlit phone-based meter app clearly offer a potential advantage over traditional sauna meters.” They also report that “there are tentative proposals to make a Bluetooth-compatible sauna stove which will adjust its temperature automatically according to your personalised settings on the 5800 SE”
They recorded their full interview with Dr. Ensimmäinen, including a [NSFW] demo of the phone being used in a sauna by young women. It is available here. Enjoy.
Glenn over at Sauna Times 
into the sauna with me the next time I go to the gym).
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