Hygge: A New Word for a Northern Way of Life

Jan. 21, 2017

A golden glow illuminates a cluster of freshly snow-covered homes. Inside, the slow process of waking has begun. New fires blaze orange against windowpanes while smoke curls from every chimney.

Through one window, a simply furnished bedroom with a rocking chair and bed can be seen. Both pieces of furniture are handmade from locally sourced wood, with unpainted bark, pinecone adornments, and gracefully curved limbs. Candles flicker at the bedside. A quilt of sky blue, gold, and snow white has been pulled smooth across the mattress. In the next room, a long wooden table made of split log abuts a wall where hand-hewn utensils wait to stir muesli. Outside, the sun is rising.

A morning so pictorial could have descended from a cozy Lyderhorn hamlet or a ski chalet tucked away at Boyne Mountain, but the scene above actually describes a glance into Hygge: A Winter’s Glow, the latest mixed-media exhibit at the Crooked Tree Arts Center (CTAC) in Traverse City.

If it sounds cozy and familiar and makes you want to sit around a table with warm beverages, friends and ample food, the artists who responded to the open call for work inspired by hygge (pronounced HUE-gah) have hit their mark: to give northern Michigan residents a new language for talking about a centuries-old feeling.

 How to Hygge

Hygge is a Danish word with no concise equivalent in American English; maybe this is because the term, which is used throughout Scandinavia, covers such a broad swath of life.

To practice hygge is to engage intimately with nature, to cultivate simplicity and enjoy life’s small pleasures, to relish open conversations with friends and eat good food and savor working with your hands.

The successful hygge practitioner will require locally sourced fabrics and foods, homespun décor and ideas for entertainment, a quiet appreciation of peaceful moments, a vast outdoor playground, lots of books and ample candlelight.

Megan Kelto, the associate director at CTAC who came up with the idea for a hygge exhibit, recognizes a common thread between the Scandinavian countries where this cultural phenomenon originated and life in northern Michigan.

“Anywhere it’s cold and dark for six months, you need to have a way to understand and embrace that,” she says.  

According to Kelto, the show’s directors left the theme open to broad interpretation, but most of the artists who contributed (all Michigan residents) still needed to perform research and generate new material to create something hyggelige (the adjectival form pronounced HUE-gah-lee) enough for the exhibit.  

Why the need for so much preparation and investigation? Maybe because the word hygge has only become part of the lexicon of North American over the past couple of years.

Nonetheless, the concept seems like a natural fit, even if it is difficult to pronounce, especially in northern regions where elements of hygge – outdoorsiness, love of food and drink and staying in with friends – are already such an engrained part of the lifestyle.

“People in northern Michigan understand what [hygge] is,” Kelto said. “We just didn’t have a word for it.”

Following the Trend

Jessilynn Norcross, co-owner of McLain and Eakin Booksellers in Petoskey, has been buying books for northern Michigan shoppers since she and her husband purchased the store eight years ago.

A witness to publishing trends that come and go, Norcross has noticed a peaked interest in books on Scandinavian lifestyle that started at least five years ago with Nordic cookbooks. She believes northern Michigan residents are interested in hygge in part because we “already savor the cornerstones of hygge philosophy: being in a cozy environment with our friends and family during the winter months.”

Brilliant Books in Traverse City currently carries six different titles pertaining to hygge with more on the way. Peter Makin, owner and book buyer, sees this interest as a response to “a rapidly changing, uncertain world” and sees the hygge idea of enjoying the moment as offering “a very welcome, human comfort.”

Hygge, Light and Dark

Hygge is by turns a lofty philosophy and a cut-and-dried guide for practical application, an approach to being happy based on a pretty specific set of rules defining what happy should look like, all the way down to the silverware.

Jacob (pronounced YAH-cub) Wheeler is the communications manager at Groundwork Center for Resilient Communities in Traverse City and the founding editor and publisher of the Glen Arbor Sun.

He is also a Danish American with dual citizenship whose mother is a citizen of Denmark although she lives stateside. He moved to Glen Arbor at age five and grew up in northern Michigan.

He agrees that the “relative homogeneity in this area, the common bond of people who choose to live off the beaten path…[and] the love of this place” are all equated to hygge.

Those things sound mighty cozy, but the idea of prizing homogeneity makes some people feel downright uhyggelige (pronounced ew-HUE-gah-lee).

Since January of 2016 when the Danish government passed a law that made asset seizure legal in the case of refugees, Denmark has received quite a bit of attention for its treatment of immigrants. In September of 2016, the New York Times published an article titled, in part, “I’ve Become a Racist” exploring how some Danish citizens feel the waves of new asylum-seeking (mostly Muslim) migrants are “draining Denmark’s…social welfare system but failing to adapt to its customs.”

According to Wheeler, who moved back to Copenhagen in 2000 to learn the language and explore the culture and who describes the city as being “filled with five-story apartments, [where] every window has a candle,” Denmark has become much more ethnically diverse in recent decades.

For him, hygge’s prerequisite of conformity is less insidious than the behavior of the Danish government. It comes down to something he recalled hearing Garrison Keillor once say about Danish custom: “It’s okay to talk about politics at the dinner table, it’s okay to argue about it, but there’s only one way to eat your lunch.”

Apparently, that’s no joke. The fork goes in the left hand and the knife goes in the right, and no one wants to suffer the consequences of failing to make proper eye contact while toasting with aquavit – seven years of bad sex.

Still, Wheeler acknowledges that a right wing anti-immigrant movement is “gaining steam” in Denmark. He admits, “There are a lot of Danes who would say, ‘No, they [immigrants] don’t conform and that’s one of the problems. They don’t learn Danish; they don’t conform to a lot of the hygge standards.’”

If the push to conform represents the dark side of hygge, then the sense of community and satisfaction in simple pleasures must be the light.

After all, the United Nation’s 2016 World Happiness Report listed Denmark as the single happiest country in the world followed closely by its Scandinavian neighbors like Iceland, Norway and Finland. In fact, of all the Scandinavian countries, only Sweden missed a top five ranking (they’re number 10 by comparison to the U.S., which ranked 13).