Nammidagur

Candy Day

In Iceland, Saturday is "nammidagur", or "Candy Day".

The basic idea of ​​"Candy Day" was that children shouldn't eat sweets every day, and to make this easier for them, there was a day on which they were allowed to snack - Saturday, "Candy Day."

That's why shops often have "nammidagur" on Saturdays, when there are discounts on sweets that are available for self-packing in plastic boxes or similar in the "Nammibar" - and the candy shelves look pretty plundered at the end of the day!

In Icelandic, sweets are called sælgæti, other synonyms are for example gotterí, gott, sætindi or nammi.

In addition, there are some more regional expressions:

In the past, sweets were often called "bolsía" (plural "bolsíur"). This term originates from the Danish word "bolsje" for candy. However, the term "bolsía" for sweets has apparently persisted to this day in northern Iceland, in the region of around Akureyri .

In Húsavík, however, people sometimes speak of mæra instead of sælgæti or something similar. Since 1994, a large town and family festival has taken place here every summer, the mærudagar. It began in April, then, from 1996, in June, and now always takes place on the last weekend in July. Residents colorfully decorate their neighborhoods, there are art events, music, and parties, and for children, there's a candy-throwing event (nammikast). There's even a special mærudagshlaup, where children can go and collect sweets (= "mæra") from specially marked houses.

Sweets at Nammibar

In many Icelandic shops, sweets were sold in the nammibar, a separate area in the store where sweets were offered in special transparent plastic boxes or similar and sold by weight.

You can still get this today in some places. I know it from the Hagkaup supermarket on Skeifan in Reykjavík, for example. You take a plastic bag and a small scoop and fill it with the treats you want, weigh the bag and the price is then based on the weight.

Nammiland in the Hagkaup supermarket

The story of Nammidagur

As far as I have found, nammidagur (= Candy Day) goes back to an initiative of Icelandic dentists in the 1980s.

In the interest of the dental health of Icelandic children and their future adults, dentists believed it was better to have a "sweets day" a week, on which they were allowed to indulge a little more, rather than eating something sweet every day and thus frequently exposing their teeth to sugar and sticky sweets. The idea behind this was probably that it would be easier for children to avoid sweets six days a week if they knew they could snack as much as they wanted on "nammidagur."

The initiative therefore had two main objectives:

On the one hand, the amount of sweets that the children ate should be reduced if they were no longer allowed to eat sweets every day but only once a week; on the other hand, the children should brush their teeth after eating on the Candy Day, when they had eaten their fill.

For Icelanders, a nation generally fond of sweet treats, this idea of ​​nammidagur apparently fell on fertile ground and in many families, candy day once a week on Saturday became a tradition.

Sweets at Nammibar

As a result, stores began offering discounts of up to 50% on their confectionery on Saturdays - that is, on sweets sold in such plastic containers for self-filling. However, this sometimes reached considerable proportions, and the floor of "Nammibar" was littered with fallen sweets by Saturday afternoon.

Nammigrís - Sweet Tooth

By the way, a sweet tooth, i.e. a person who likes to snack, is a "nammigrís" in Icelandic, literally a "candy-piglet".

However, this term isn't used derogatorily, but rather jokingly. So, the expression has nothing to do with the fact that the nammibar might look like a pigsty at the end of the nammidagur ...

[Translated from here.]