by Meik Wiking
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
THE KEY TO HAPPINESS?
LIGHT
WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT HYGGE
TOGETHERNESS
FOOD AND DRINK
CLOTHING
HOME
HYGGE OUTSIDE THE HOME
HYGGE ALL YEAR ROUND
HYGGE ON THE CHEAP
HYGGE TOUR OF COPENHAGEN
CHRISTMAS
SUMMER HYGGE
FIVE DIMENSIONS OF HYGGE
HYGGE AND HAPPINESS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
COPYRIGHT
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
INTRODUCTION
Hooga? Hhyooguh? Heurgh? It is not important how you choose to pronounce or even spell hygge. To paraphrase one of the greatest philosophers of our time—Winnie-the-Pooh—when asked how to spell a certain emotion, “You don’t spell it, you feel it.”
However, spelling and pronouncing hygge is the easy part. Explaining exactly what it is, that’s the tricky part. Hygge has been called everything from “the art of creating intimacy,” “coziness of the soul,” and “the absence of annoyance,” to “taking pleasure from the presence of soothing things,” “cozy togetherness,” and my personal favorite, “cocoa by candlelight”.
Hygge is about an atmosphere and an experience, rather than about things. It is about being with the people we love. A feeling of home. A feeling that we are safe, that we are shielded from the world and allow ourselves to let our guard down. You may be having an endless conversation about the small or big things in life—or just be comfortable in each other’s silent company—or simply just be by yourself enjoying a cup of tea.
One December just before Christmas, I was spending the weekend with some friends at an old cabin. The shortest day of the year was brightened by the blanket of snow covering the surrounding landscape. When the sun set, around four in the afternoon, we would not see it again for seventeen hours, and we headed inside to get the fire going.
We were all tired after hiking and were half asleep, sitting in a semicircle around the fireplace in the cabin, wearing big sweaters and woolen socks. The only sounds you could hear were the stew boiling, the sparks from the fireplace, and someone having a sip of mulled wine. Then one of my friends broke the silence.
“Could this be any more hygge?” he asked rhetorically.
“Yes,” one of the women said after a moment. “If there was a storm raging outside.”
We all nodded.
THE KEY TO HAPPINESS?
I have the best job in the world. I study what makes people happy. At the Happiness Research Institute, which is an independent think tank focusing on well-being, happiness, and quality of life, we explore the causes and effects of human happiness and work toward improving the quality of life of citizens across the world.
We are based in Denmark, and yes, we do have lit candles at the office Monday to Friday, and yes, our office was partly chosen because of the hygge factor. No fireplace, though. Yet. But we were also founded and are based in Denmark because the country consistently ranks among the happiest nations in the world. Denmark is by no means a perfect utopia, and the country faces challenges and issues like any other country, but I do believe Denmark can be a source of inspiration for how countries can increase the quality of life of their citizens.
Denmark’s position as one of the happiest countries in the world has created a lot of media interest. On a weekly basis, I am asked questions like “Why are the Danes so happy?” and “What can we learn from the Danes when it comes to happiness?” from journalists from The New York Times, the BBC, The Guardian, the China Daily, and The Washington Post, among others. In addition, delegations of mayors, researchers, and policy makers from all corners of the earth frequently visit the Happiness Research Institute in pursuit of . . . well . . . happiness—or at least in pursuit of the reasons for the high levels of happiness, well-being, and quality of life people enjoy in Denmark. To many, it is quite the mystery, as besides the horrific weather, Danes are also subject to some of the highest tax rates in the world.
Interestingly, there is wide support for the welfare state. The support stems from an awareness of the fact that the welfare model turns our collective wealth into well-being. We are not paying taxes, we are investing in our society. We are purchasing quality of life. The key to understanding the high levels of well-being in Denmark is the welfare model’s ability to reduce risk, uncertainty, and anxiety among its citizens and to prevent extreme unhappiness.
However, recently, I have also come to realize that there might be an overlooked ingredient in the Danish recipe for happiness—hygge. The word hygge originates from a Norwegian word meaning “well-being”. For almost five hundred years, Denmark and Norway were one kingdom, until Denmark lost Norway in 1814. Hygge appeared in written Danish for the first time in the early 1800s, and the link between hygge and well-being or happiness may be no coincidence.
Danes are the happiest people in Europe according to the European Social Survey, but they are also the ones who meet most often with their friends and family and feel the calmest and most peaceful. Therefore, it is with good reason that we see a growing interest in hygge. Journalists are touring Denmark searching for hygge; in the UK, a college is now teaching Danish hygge; and around the world, hygge bakeries, shops, and cafés are popping up. But how do you create hygge? How are hygge and happiness linked? And what is hygge exactly? Those are some of the questions this book seeks to answer.
CHAPTER ONE
LIGHT
INSTANT HYGGE: CANDLES
No recipe for hygge is complete without candles. When Danes are asked what they most associate with hygge, an overwhelming 85 percent will mention candles.
The word for “spoilsport” in Danish is lyseslukker, which means “the one who puts out the candles”, and this is no coincidence. There is no faster way to get to hygge than to light a few candles or, as they are called in Danish, levende lys, or living lights. The American ambassador to Denmark, Rufus Gifford, said of the Danes’ love affair with candles: “I mean, it is not just in the living room. It is everywhere. In your classrooms, in your boardrooms. As an American, you think, ‘Fire hazard!—how can you possibly have an open flame in your classroom?’ It is kind of an emotional happiness, an emotional coziness.”
The American ambassador is onto something. According to the European Candle Association, Denmark burns more candles per head than anywhere in Europe. Each Dane burns around thirteen pounds of candle wax each year. To put this in context, each Dane consumes around six and a half pounds of bacon per year (yes, bacon consumption per capita is a standard metric in Denmark). The candle consumption is a European record. In fact, Denmark burns almost twice as much candle wax as the runner-up, Austria, with a little under seven pounds per year. However, scented candles are not a big thing. In fact, Asp-Holmblad, Denmark’s oldest producer of candles, doesn’t even include scented candles in their product range. Scented candles are considered artificial, and Danes prefer natural and organic products. In fact, Danes rank towards the top of the list in Europe when it comes to buying organic.
More than half of Danes light candles almost every day during autumn and winter, and only 4 percent say they never light candles, according to a survey by one of the major newspapers in Denmark. During December, the candle consumption soars to thrice as many, and this is also the time to witness the special candle that is to be burned only in the days leading up to Christmas, namely the kalenderlys—the advent candle. This candle is marked with twenty-four lines, one for each day in December before Christmas, turning it into the slowest countdown clock in the world.
Another special candle
occasion is May 4, also known as lysfest, or light party. On this evening in 1945, the BBC broadcast that the German forces who had occupied Denmark since 1940 had surrendered. As in many countries during World War II, Denmark was subject to blackouts to prevent enemy aircraft from navigating by city lights. Today, Danes still celebrate the return of the light on this evening by putting candles in their windows.
Hyggelige as the Danes may be, there is one serious drawback to being crazy about candles: the soot. Studies show that lighting just one candle fills the air with more microparticles than traffic in a busy street.
A study undertaken by the Danish Building Research Institute showed that candles shed more particles indoors than either cigarettes or cooking. Despite Denmark being a highly regulated country, we have yet to see warning labels on candles. Nobody messes with the hygge fanatics. There is now a growing awareness among Danes of the importance of airing out a room after burning candles. Nevertheless, despite the health implications, Danes continue to consume candles in obscene quantities.
LAMPS
Lighting is not just about candles. Danes are obsessed by lighting in general. I once spent two hours walking around Rome with my girlfriend at the time to find a restaurant that had hyggelig lighting.
Danes select lamps carefully and place them strategically to create soothing pools of light. It is an art form, a science, and an industry. Some of the most beautifully designed lamps in the world come from the golden age of Danish design—for example, the lamps of Poul Henningsen, Arne Jacobsen, and Verner Panton. Visit a student on a shoestring budget and you may still encounter a $1,300 Verner Panton lamp in the corner of her hundred-square-foot flat.
The rule of thumb is: the lower the temperature of the light, the more hygge. A camera flash is around 5,500 Kelvin (K), fluorescent tubes are 5,000K, incandescent lamps 3,000K, while sunsets and wood and candle flames are about 1,800K. That is your hygge sweet spot.
The closest you will ever come to seeing vampires burned by daylight is by inviting a group of Danes for a hygge dinner and then placing them under a 5,000K fluorescent light tube. At first they will squint, trying to examine the torture device you have placed in the ceiling. Then, as dinner begins, observe how they move uncomfortably around in their chairs, compulsively scratching and trying to suppress twitches.
The obsession with lighting comes from the lack of contact with it in the natural world from October to March. During this time, the only resource Denmark has in abundance is darkness. Summers in Denmark are beautiful. When the first rays of light reach the country, Danes awaken from their hibernation and fall over themselves to find spots in the sun. I love summer in Denmark. It is my favorite time of the year. And if it wasn’t bad enough that winters are dark and cold and summers are short, Denmark also has 179 days of rain per year. Game of Thrones fans, think of the city of Winterfell.
That is why hygge has been refined to the level it has, and why it is seen as part of the national identity and culture in Denmark. Hygge is the antidote to the cold winter, the rainy days, and the duvet of darkness. So while you can have hygge all year round, it is during winter that it becomes not only a necessity but a survival strategy. That is why Danes have a reputation of being hygge fundamentalists and talk about it . . . a lot.
My favorite spot in my apartment in Copenhagen is the windowsill in the kitchen-dining area. It is wide enough to sit comfortably in and I’ve added pillows and blankets to make it a real hyggekrog (see the hygge dictionary in Chapter 2). The radiator underneath the windowsill makes it the perfect place to enjoy a cup of tea on a cold winter night. But what I like about it most is the warm amber glow issuing from every apartment across the courtyard. It’s a constantly changing mosaic of radiance as people leave and return home. In part, I owe this view to Poul Henningsen. Inevitably, a well-lit room in Denmark is likely to hold a lamp by the architect and designer all Danes know simply as PH.
He was to light fixtures what Edison was to the lightbulb. PH was, like most Danes today, obsessed with light. Some call him the world’s first lighting architect, as he devoted his career to exploring the importance of light for our well-being, aiming to develop a lamp that could spread light without subjecting people to a direct glare.
Poul Henningsen was born in 1894 and did not grow up with electric light but in the soft glow of petroleum lamps. These were his source of inspiration. His designs shape and refine the power of the electric light yet maintain the softness of the light of a petroleum lamp.
It doesn’t cost money to light a room correctly—but it does require culture. From the age of eighteen, when I began to experiment with light, I have been searching for harmony in lighting. Human beings are like children. As soon as they get new toys, they throw away their culture and the orgy starts. The electric light gave the possibility of wallowing in light.
When, in the evening, from the top of a tram car, you look into all the homes on the first floor, you shudder at how dismal people’s homes are. Furniture, style, carpets—everything in the home is unimportant, compared to the positioning of the lighting.
Poul Henningsen (1894–1967), “On Light”
THREE ICONIC DANISH LAMPS
THE PH LAMP
After a decade of experiments with lamps and lighting in his attic, Henningsen presented the first PH lamp in 1925. It gave a softer and more diffused light by using a series of layered shades to disperse the light yet conceal the lightbulb. In addition, to bring the harsh white light toward the red end of the spectrum, PH gave the inner side of one element of the shade a red colour. His biggest success was PH5, which has metal shades and was launched in 1958, but PH lamps have now been produced in over a thousand different designs. Many of these are not in production anymore, and the rarest lamps can go for more than $25,000 at auction.
LE KLINT
In 1943, the Klint family started producing lampshades with folding pleats, but in fact they had been designed four decades earlier by Peder Vilhelm Jensen-Klint, a Danish architect, for his own use, as he had designed a petroleum lamp and needed a shade. It became a family business, applying the skills in design, innovation, and business of the sons and daughters of Klint.
PANTON VP GLOBE
The Panton VP Globe is a pendant lamp that casts calming, diffused light from its center rim. It was designed in 1969 by Verner Panton—the enfant terrible of Danish design who loved to work with modern materials such as plastic and steel. Panton attended the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Schools of Architecture, Design and Conservation, a leading institution for architecture, which today includes a “light laboratory” that examines daylight and artificial lighting.
BETTER THAN PHOTOSHOP
Members of one profession might be just as obsessed with lighting as the Danes: photographers. Photography means painting with light, and doing it increases your understanding of light and your ability to see and appreciate it.
This might be the reason why I love photography and have taken tens of thousands of pictures over the past ten years, and why my favorite light is the golden hour. The golden hour is roughly the first hour after sunrise and the last hour before sunset. When the sun is low in the sky, the sunlight has to travel through a greater depth of atmosphere. During these times, it produces a warm, soft, diffused light. It is sometimes also called the “magic hour”, and I think I have fallen in love with every woman whose picture I have taken at this time of day for that 1/250 of a second. This is the light you want to aim for if you are going for hyggelig lighting indoors. The flattering quality of the lighting will make you and all your friends look “grotto-fabulous.” It’s better than any Instagram filter.
HYGGE TIP: CREATE HYGGELIG LIGHTING
You guessed it. Bring out the candles. But remember to air out the room. However, you may also want to consider your electric-light strategy. Usually, several smaller lamps around the room create a more hyggeligt light than one big lamp set in the ceiling. You want to create small caves of light around the roo
m.
CHAPTER TWO
WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT HYGGE
IT’S ALL ABOUT THE HYGGE
The Danish language has been called many things, but seldom beautiful. Google “Danish sounds like . . . ,” and the first two suggestions that appear are “German” and “potato.” To foreigners, Danish sounds like someone speaking German with a hot potato in their mouth.
To be fair, some people have also suggested it sounds somewhat like a diseased seal choking. Nevertheless, it is rich when it comes to describing hygge.
Hygge comes in the form of both a verb and an adjective. Something can be hyggelig(t) (hygge-like): What a hyggelig living room! It was so hyggeligt to see you! Have a hyggelig time!
We throw the words hygge and hyggelig around so much that, to foreigners, it might appear excessive. We have to state how hyggelig everything is. All the time. And not just in the hygge moment itself. We talk about how hyggeligt it will be to get together on Friday, and on Monday we will remind each other of how hyggelig Friday was.
Hygge is a key performance indicator of most Danish social gatherings. “Honey, do you think our guests hyggede themselves?” (It’s the past tense—don’t attempt to pronounce it.)
Every few weeks, I meet up with a group of guys to play poker. It is quite an international group, with people from Mexico, the United States, Turkey, France, England, India and Denmark. Over the years, we have covered most subjects ranging from women to how to optimize the range of an orange cannon. Due to the diversity of the group, our conversations are always in English. Nevertheless, there is one Danish word that is often used around the table. You guessed it. Often it will come from Danny from Mexico after losing a big hand: “It doesn’t matter. I am just here for the hygge.”