The Most Hygge Time of the Year

Photo by OurWhisky Foundation on Unsplash

Today we sat around our kitchen table, my girls and me, watching a perfect, lazy snowfall drift by the windows outside. I sat between piles of schoolbooks and manipulatives with my steaming coffee and the blanket I’m currently crocheting cozy on my lap. The kitten, asleep in Rena’s lap while she wrestled with equations, gave a whispery snore. Lee, restless from writing numbers, started working by columns instead of rows—all the 0’s, then all the 1’s… Candles from yesterday’s attempt to enchant the restart of the school year still clustered in the center of the table, and Lee had put the matchbox right beside her math book, just in case she needed to light another one today. Neither girl was staying focused particularly well, but to my surprise I realized it didn’t matter. I felt…huh. I felt completely content. How odd.

I blame the snow. It’s been snowing all week, prompting many complaints from the girls about it coming too late for Christmas (“even our Christmas,” which we celebrated the weekend after). I adore snowy winter days no matter how cold they might be. Snow brightens the darkness of winter, even during the early nights, it’s reflective nature magnifying the softer light of winter into something so bright it can be blinding. The increased light of snowy days perks me up, and the inherent coziness and magic of snowfall curls around me like a blanket. Since I prefer to stay off the roads while it’s making it’s journey from clouds to ground, my natural home-body tendencies are enhanced during weeks like this. It’s has been a week for reading, plush blankets, and lots of steaming mugs brimming with goodness. It has been a week of hygge.

As a person who tends to daydream my way through life, and is thus chronically late to societal trends (and, well, everything else), I knew neither the definition nor pronunciation of this Danish/Scandinavian word (pronounced “hoo-ga, in case you also didn’t know) until very recently. Adopted into the Oxford English dictionary in 2017, hygge is defined as: “the quality of being warm and comfortable that gives a feeling of happiness,” which feels about as stripped of cultural nuance as a definition can get. Modern stabs at translating the Old Norse, old Danish, and proto-German words from which this word was potentially derived has yielded more satisfying results: “to comfort,” “to console,” “protected from the outside world,” “to think/reconsider,” “Soul,” “mind,” or “consciousness.”¹ Hygge, it would seem, is as difficult to define as human happiness itself. In an interview with NPR, Meik Wiking, author of The Little Book of Hygge, says:

Hygge's been called many things. It's been called the art of creating a nice atmosphere. It's been called the pursuit of everyday happiness. But it's basically building in elements of togetherness, of savoring simple pleasures, of relaxation, of comfort on an everyday basis.²

Hygge seems to me like a daily practice of contentment; but notably different from the Christian-derived idea of contentment with which I am most familiar in that it has also been described as “healthy hedonism” (which is my favorite definition so far, what a delicious concept!). Fresh from the dazzling indulgence of the holidays, my inner critic tells me that I deserve a month of penitent self-denial to make up for it, but my soul longs for hygge. And why not? As Anna Altman wrote in an article for the New Yorker,

Winter is the most hygge time of year. It is candles, nubby woolens, shearling slippers, woven textiles, pastries, blond wood, sheepskin rugs, lattes with milk-foam hearts, and a warm fireplace. Hygge can be used as a noun, adjective, verb, or compound noun, like hyggebukser, otherwise known as that shlubby pair of pants you would never wear in public but secretly treasure. Hygge can be found in a bakery and in the dry heat of a sauna in winter, surrounded by your naked neighbors. It’s wholesome and nourishing, like porridge; Danish doctors recommend “tea and hygge” as a cure for the common cold.³