Winter is a difficult season for me. Although there is much I love about it; cool crisp air, woolly jumpers and the majesty of bare branches, to name but a few; what’s not so much fun is the winter blues. In September their arrival merely hinted at, are in full occupation by October in all their teary, anxiety making, energy sapping glory. Over the years I’ve developed various strategies for dealing with them; a daylight lamp and regular exercise being the chief methods for keeping them at bay, or at least partly at bay. Hygge does the rest.
Hygge is the Danish attitude to life that doesn’t have a direct translation in English, but has been loosely defined as cosiness, or as the blogger Anna Lea West more descriptively terms it as ‘cosiness of the soul’. Hygge is a feeling, arising out of nights shared in the company of good friends and good food, or by curling up with a beloved besides a warm fire drinking hot chocolate and eating homemade spiced cake. In addition to all of these, hygge for me is the long forest walks I take with my beloved, both of us wrapped up in cosy woollens and armed with a flask of coffee; or the homey evenings we spend in front of the wood burning stove in our garden hideaway. It is also afternoons writing at my kitchen table while a scented candle flickers away giving everything a warm yellowy aura.
Hygge has transformed my winters into a time to be cherished rather than feared, and while I can’t claim to be wholly depression free, I’m certainly not the amorphous mass wrapped in a duvet refusing to move from the sofa that I once was either. I can count on one hand the ‘bad’ days I’ve had so far this winter and that is definitely something to celebrate, perhaps, with a little cake, hot chocolate and a candle or two.