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shopping time and city time, which do not completely overlap, although both are
related to the abstract time of the clock. The shopping centre also constructs its own
calendar of seasons that deviates from the ‘natural’ seasons, but resembles the eccle-
siastical year. This resemblance stems from the importance that both Christian reli-
gion and commerce attribute to feasts like Easter and Christmas, and may be
interpreted as a commercial reconstruction of the ecclesiastical year. Commercial
reconstructions of traditional calendar time are widespread around the world, but
also locally specific, depending on a combination of natural and cultural condi-
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tions. For instance, the sharply marked changes of seasons in the Nordic zone make
midsummer a highly celebrated feast, with historical connections reaching far back
to the days of hunters and gatherers, and to the old agrarian calendar that has partly
been incorporated into the ecclesiastical year.
Christmas, Easter and Midsummer Day are the focal points of the seasonality
displayed in Solna Centre, as in most other commercial spaces in Nordic countries.
However, from these focal points the seasonality of the shopping centre deviates from
the culturally defined and officially proclaimed ‘natural’ or meteorological seasons of
the year. The most striking deviation is the absence or marginalizing of the winter
season in the calendar of the shopping centre. According to the astronomical defini-
tion of the seasons in the Nordic hemisphere, winter starts on 21 December and ends
on 20 March. There are, however, few traces of this annually recurring three-month
cycle of winter within the shopping centre, where it is replaced by Christmas and
spring as symbolic focal points of commerce and consumption. Christmas tends to
start by the end of October in the shopping centre, when expectations of the
Christmas holidays are displayed through Christmas trees, gifts, greetings cards,
carols, advertising, and so on, and lasts approximately until mid February, when
Christmas sales, after-greetings and the collecting of disposed Christmas trees come
to an end. When that happens, spring has already begun its symbolic entry into the
shopping centre, with the display of phenomena like the new spring fashions, adver-
tising slogans that proclaim that the brighter season of spring has arrived, and expec-
tations of the summer to come.
In this way the astronomical calendar, with its four equally long seasons of spring,
summer, autumn and winter, is reconstructed as a commercial calendar, where spring
lasts approximately four months, summer three months, autumn two months, and
Christmas three months. Here, the dark, cold and snowy or slushy winter tends to
disappear from the customers’ views, with delimited exceptions in retail stores for
winter sports, games or clothes. The fact that this commercial calendar is supported
by advertising, and especially the overall and trans-national mediation of Christmas,
points to its universality in the late-modern world, even though different societies
and cultures perform it in particular versions.
This is just one instance of how the corporeal experience of shopping is
surrounded by mediated reconstructions of consumption time that derive from layers
of abstract, concrete and historical time, in ways that make those reconstructions
unnoticeable and quasi-natural. The commercial calendar of consumptive seasonality

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