The Warmth of the Inverted Year
Originally published in Kinfolk Magazine, later re-published in Northern Comfort.

The rain had rinsed the streets of pedestrians, ushering them into their safe warm places.

The people who were out that night were heavily bundled and galoshened against the wind and the wet. There was no snow yet; maybe by Christmastime. A laughing couple rode their bicycles past me while I fumbled with a rain-ruined, hand drawn map. The old town’s architecture stood ancient and asymmetrical all around me—like a stage for a crooked fairy tale, a lost scene from Dickens. On a nearby balcony a cigarette glowed red through a rising night mist. It was seven o’clock. It felt much later. It had been dark for hours. The street was empty now—motionless except for me—and, for a moment, I felt like the stranger I was. I breathed into my hands and scanned the buildings for an address, a house number, anything. I was half sure this was the right street. Down here the city was irregular at best, a medieval patchwork sewn together by a million alleys and waterways. What had Jacob said, “look for the green door and the candles in the window.” The candles in the window. But there were so many windows. So many candles this time of year.

I took a wrong turn, then another. I double backed. I was lost. And then I was found. Candles in the window. I locked my rusty old bike to a rusty old fence. Wood smoke rose from the chimney above the house with the green door. From a ground floor window an orange glow spilled into the gloomy street below. Standing on my tiptoes I could see the faces of my friends inside, gathered closely around something. A game? A story? A table of food? They were smiling, talking with their hands. A bolt of laughter. A raised glass of wine. Then Jacob at the window, waving me inside. I hardly needed an invitation; the glow from the window, the friendly countenances, the echo of laughter, the promise of wine were already ushering me into that safe warm place, out of the cold, and into the light of the best of human defenses against winter’s darkness.

I moved to Denmark in the summertime. When the days are long and light is plentiful. Where, for a season, the warm sun draws people out into the wide open spaces. Into the high brightness. In the short months before the long dark returns. Copenhagen was magic that summer. Enchanted. Twenty hours of daylight can do strange things to a mind and body coming out of hibernation. Sunburned men and women cycled through the crooked city streets. Sometimes barefoot. Always smiling. Shops closed for weeks to air out their staff. Busy boats filled the city’s canals. Commuters lingered on their walks home, visiting with friends at patio bars and stopping for ice creams along the harbor. At night, apartments and houses emptied their residents into gardens for endless dinners. The sun never really set, it merely reclined in the west until standing up at dawn. The children couldn’t sleep. Nobody could sleep. Nobody wanted to sleep. The Scandinavian summer is something of a revolution—a throwing off of routine and rules and the confinement of walls and clothes. Every precious summer day, a holiday. Nothing taken for granted. A bright reminder of all that is best in life.

And then September came. The sun grew bashful. No more dinners in the garden. Autumn was a moment between extremes. The summer gold faded into gray by October, to wet gray by November, and then into cold wet gray by December. The contrast between summer and winter was profound—almost painful. As an American from the Midwest I knew about cold winters, but not this deep darkness. The long winter months are hard, arriving as an uninvited guest. Nordic people have always understood this and adapted. The combination of dreary weather and darkness is a recipe for despair. The winter season seems to offer only limitations. How then do the Danes manage the harshness of winter after winter, year after year? What inner lamp burns bright enough to keep people warm against the bleak midwinter, against the darkness?

I found the answer through the window of the house with the green door. The friends framed inside—a moving picture of good cheer—gathered together around the common things that combat the dark nights of the year as well as the dark nights of the soul: comfort food and camaraderie, woolen blankets, and bottles of wine. The Danes have a word for this shared warmth. It’s a word we do not have in English: hygge (pronounced hoo-gah). It means something like ‘cozy’ and ‘safe’ and ‘peaceful.’ Hygge smells like cinnamon and feels like a child’s Christmas. Maybe hygge is untranslatable because, like all the best things in life, it can’t be captured in mere words. Whether you’re trying to describe young love or the first moments of fatherhood, simple words are like ill-fitting clothes: undersized and unflattering. And while hygge can happen in any season or place, it is certainly most fully realized in the darkest moments of the year, when candles and fireplaces and twinkling bulbs and kindness are the best weapons we have against the gloom.

Winter is a collector of close comforts. The Englishman Thomas Cowper understood this unique quality of winter when he wrote, “O Winter! ruler of the inverted year...I crown thee king of intimate delights, fireside enjoyments, home-born happiness, and all the comforts that the lowly roof of undisturbed retirement, and the hours of long uninterrupted evening, know.” 

And that is, precisely, what I found inside the room with the candles in the window—comfort, delight, and happiness. In the presence of friends I found warmth against both the cold dark of winter and the common hardships of life. That night, the room with the glowing window became a sanctuary whose green door kept back the bleak weather and the black of night. Inside we were a handful of radiant souls pouring light out into the dark winter street. We were hopeful characters in a high northern story, sharing the unselfish light of hospitality and laughter and hope which are, and have always been, the great shield and sword against the melancholy shadow of the inverted year.

Originally published in Kinfolk Magazine.