When it is time to eat the jam, you are tasting the climax of a slow process involving memories, patience, and friendship. Then, you and your friends can find a time to meet up and boil the fruit, add sugar, and wait for the jam to simmer. The best way to embody hygge when making jam on toast is to spend a day with friends hand-picking the berries yourself to gather the fruit mixture. To illustrate this concept more clearly, imagine jam on toast as the hygge meal in question. Furthermore, a slow-meal preparation process makes the end-product extra hyggeligt. Wiking emphasizes that a true hyggeligt meal is not complete without high quality ingredients and people to eat with.

It is contentment, joy, and pleasure.Ī key element of hygge is food. That warm fuzzy feeling is the feeling of hygge. You can’t stop talking about that last run or just how good it feels to take off your boots. In this god-given cabin, there is hot chocolate, warm chili, and fresh wool socks. Hair is messy, lips are chapped, melting snow is falling down ankles. Everyone is tired and delusional from facing the elements. Imagine this: after a long day skiing out in the cold, you and your friends stumble into a warm, fire-lit cabin, take off your wet ski clothes, and collapse into a huge armchair. Soft lit candles, blankets, chocolate cake, and wool socks are hygge at face value, yet the notions of patience, togetherness, warmth, and focus characterize such happy Danish traditions. Social science measures the benefits of a nation that values social connection, community, and pleasure the same way Americans value freedom.

However, Danes are statistically the happiest people in the world. Denmark is cold and dark for most of the year. Hygge directly translates to the feeling of warmth, happiness, and security.

The Danish book “A Little Book of Hygge” by Meik Wiking, the CEO of the Happiness Research Institute, inspired me to discover hygge equivalents in American culture. Hygge, pronounced ‘hoog-ah,’ is a Danish word that translates best to comfort in English, somewhat comparable to gemütlichkeit in German. | LIFE | By Katherine Moynihan | Illustration by Patil Khakhamian

The little book of hygge book