This is as good a time as any to talk about hygge, I suppose. It’s a chilly rainy Sunday, I made a big pot of soup and a crock pot of buffalo chicken dip for the Eagles game, and while my sons spew foul epithets at players (who just an hour before were “studs,”) and speak in barbed tongues about traitorous interceptions and predictable sacks, I’m wrapped in a plush blanket, drinking pumpkin tea and trying my best to ignore them.
Doesn’t get much more hygge-like than that.
(I grew up with three brothers whose lives revolved around the Eagles’ performances, and the climate of our household was predicated on it. Now I have three sons for whom the same theory applies, and it’s like I have been thrown into Doc Brown’s Delorian and driven back to 1981. In Super Bowl XV, I was present when Herman Edwards recovered the ball and ran it back for a touchdown to defeat the Dallas Cowboys for the NFC championship. My brothers sailed on that victory for years, a victory that also cemented Dick Vermeil as a golden god in our household. More on the Birds another day).
“Hygge” (pronounced “hue-gah” or “hoo-gah”) is a quality of coziness and comfortable conviviality that engenders a feeling of contentment or well-being, and is regarded as a defining characteristic of Danish culture. Here, October and on through cold soggy spring is hygge-season, and those of us who love sweaters and fuzzy socks and fluffy flannel comforters and cups of steaming hot tea and fires and gray skies and Hunter boots and rainy days and snow drifts and Uggs consider hygge practically a religion.
Not everyone seeks hygge. I have heard unsettling tales of people who emerge from six months of hot and humid summer weather only to travel to Florida (on purpose!) for six more months of hot and humid summer weather. Back-and-forth, back-and-forth they go, loving the sweat, the killer sun, and omni-present desperate flight into air conditioning. They wear shorts and flip-flops all year long, golf on Christmas day, and get a tan on New Year’s Eve.
Lunatics. But to each his own.
(If Dante consigned me to a circle of hell, that would be mine. Banished to humid Florida weather twelve months a year. Nay. Give me Antarctica or give me death).
It is universally agreed upon that hygge is best created and enjoyed in cool and cold months. However, while summer does not lend itself easily to hygge, it is possible to create it. Think moonlight beach bonfires. Firepit parties in a backyard with lantern lights and a soft playlist. Candlelit dinner parties. An air-conditioned restaurant and an ice-cold gin and tonic after a long hot day. Even a simple umbrella propped up over a beach chair, providing much needed cool shade on a hot beach day can provide a quick dose of hygge. You know that feeling when you take a dip in the ocean on a hot day, and you come out feeling your skin sizzling with relief from the cool water? Then you collapse in your beach chair, your entire body shimmers with delicious goodness, and you just…smile?
Hygge.
Not everyone needs or seeks hygge. These people don’t sleep with fluffy comforters. Even in the cold winter months they see no need for boots, candles or soothing playlists, and say “No thanks” when offered hot chocolate in a snow storm. Fires seem to hold no charm for them, nor fuzzy socks or thick warm blankets.
They baffle me. I can only assume they are sociopaths.
Some people appreciate the idea of hygge but are unsure how to create it. Like any ambience, hygge is a practiced art. And while it does come naturally to some, others have to work at it. Because hygge is texture, length and width. Hygge is light scheme and muted tones. Hygge is rounded corners and soft shapes. Hygge is feeling warm but not hot, being friendly but not overbearing, feeling safe but not suffocated. Hygge is not loud, or bright, or garish, or uncertain. It is solidity, and surety, and assurance. It is confidence, it is contentment, it is credence, it is conviction.
Hygge is not just a physical presence. It is a state of mind.
You can enter someone’s home in any season and sense the lack of hygge. The home is rife with sharp corners, awkward angles, and forked tongues. The home has garish lighting, shrill volume, even cacophonous language. There are no visible places to cozy up, and the home does not exude warmth or contentment; rather, it oozes discontent and chill. These are the places you excuse yourself from as quickly as possible, for reasons you yourself do not quite understand.
For hygge is as much internal as it is external.
I differ from many hygge-lovers in that I believe one can have too much hygge. When you look up the opposite of “hygge,” words you find are discomfort. Discontent. Confusion, unease, disgruntlement. I disagree with these antonyms as it applies to living life, because while having hygge in your soul can bring peace to your home, it is also important to seek the world, a world which is unfortunately filled with ire. But it is the hygge in your heart that will temper that discontent. It will mute it, and water it down. If you are a hygge-practicer, no amount of the world’s distemper can eradicate the peace in your heart.
I don’t mean to make it sound easy. It’s not. I struggle with it too. That feeling of sitting down at the end of the day, looking around and saying, “This is enough.” The size of my home is enough, the make and model of my car is enough, my salary is enough. My kids, my wardrobe, my education, my job, my expectations for what I wanted to accomplish in my life is enough, goddammit! But alas, we are humans. We are built to achieve, strive, build, create. Settling back and feeling content is almost blasphemous to some of us. To some of us, it is the feeling of…defeat. I am done, you are saying to the universe when you feel content with your life. I don’t want to achieve anything else, I am happy NOW.
Scary. What does one do when one no longer feels the need to create?
I like to earn my hygge. I could never cower under a blanket 24-hours a day. At the completion of this blog on Monday morning, the weather is more inclement than it was yesterday. My blanket is warm, and my house cozy. But I have a day, and many things (some highly unpleasant) to accomplish in this day. There will be no cuddling and tea until way into the late afternoon, but when it arrives, you can bet I will enjoy it. Even when cowering in my home from blizzards, Nor’easters and derechos, I eventually need to get out. Being out in nature’s fury makes me feel alive.
Moderation in all things. Yin and Yang. All things existing as inseparable and contradictory. Each side having at its core an element of the other. Neither pole superior to the other, with a correct balance between the two reached to achieve harmony. No order without chaos. Hot skin, cold water.
Hope you find your dose of hygge on this October 12th Monday.