Once upon a time in beautiful Northern California, the sun rose before 6 am, and set past 8:30. The warm rays caressed our tanned skins, smells of neighbors’ BBQs wafted into the air, and laughter filled our playground until the early hours of the evening. The summer days stretched before our eyes, slow-paced and lazy.
Those days feel surreal to me now, almost like a fantasy, sitting at my kitchen table in a heavy sweater and socks as I type these words. My fingertips and toes are refusing to warm up despite my attempts. It’s 44 degrees Fahrenheit outside (7 C), which is cold, and by Californian standard, VERY cold. It’s overcast and rainy for the foreseeable future, and, in compliance with Murphy’s law (or Finagle’s law in this situation), our heater decided to stop working… in the middle of Thanksgiving break.
Since daylight saving ended about a month ago, I’ve had a hard time adjusting to the change in time and weather. The days are short and cold, and the nights feel endless. And that’s living in California- one of the sunniest places in the world. I can’t imagine how it would be like living in Scandinavia. But perhaps it’s because of this fact that it’s harder for me to accept the transition to this season. Our life here revolves so much around spending time outdoors, and it’s one of the things I love most about living in California.
I spent the beginning of November mourning the end of those warm and long afternoons. Back then, even when my son wanted to play inside after we came back from daycare, we did so in a sunlit living room, with daddy home, and our ears filled with sounds of life outside. But these days, we come back to a dark and quiet house. My husband started a new position at UC Berkeley, and three days a week, he comes home around 7 pm due to the long commute. With these changes, indoor play lost the special flavor that it had before. It felt slow and lonely. We played with all the toys that my son loved until we got bored, and we still had a few more hours until bedtime.
A few days into this new phase, I became overwhelmed by the monotony of our evenings. I realized that unless I did something to change our routine, we were bound to spend our time running the clock. I didn’t want that to happen, and although I think boredom is sometimes good, I didn’t want it to be the norm. I sat down one day and did a little bit of research, and I brainstormed ideas of fun things to do indoors. I decided to have a plan for what to do with my son when we came home, and do something different at least once or twice a week.
It has been a few weeks now, and we did a bunch of fun, out-of-the-box activities that introduced a sense of novelty and excitement into our evenings. We took out our polaroid camera and took pictures of various objects around the house. We did a 300-piece jigsaw puzzle, and bought a 500-piece one. We built a fort with a spare bedsheet and a few bamboo sticks from our patio, and we decorated it with fairy lights. We walked to the local library, which we never managed to go to in the summer, and when the weather was dry, we went to our playground in the dark, which my son found very exciting.
We began dancing to a new rhythm in life, a rhythm that perhaps didn’t include as much sunshine and BBQ, but one that nontheless had its own uniqueness. I recalled the concept of “Hygge”, which I learned after spending sometime in Denmark the summer of last year, and read more about in The Year Of Living Danishly by Helen Russell. “Hygge” is a danish term, pronounced “hoo-guh” that describes a quality of comfort, well-being, coziness and togetherness. It is better described as a state of mind, associated with gratitude and taking pleasure in little things. It could be used to describe anything that brings a sense of contentment. Because the winters in Denmark are long and dark, people cope with them using “hygge”. They create their own comfort inside their homes by spending time with loved ones, wrapped in warm blankets and sipping hot tea.
I loved the idea of “hygge” and how the Danes use it to get through their winters. I decided to actively create that sense of warmth in our home, along with my list of indoors activities. We started to have more get-togethers with our friends and neighbors. We planned playdates, weeknight dinners and weekend outings. And the more we did that, the less I thought about how gloomy and dark the weather was outside, and the happier I became.
The new sense of togetherness reminded me of my life back in Saudi Arabia. The summers are unbearably hot, with an average high around 100 F (38 C), reaching 122 F (50 C) at its worst. The only reason you’d leave your house mid-day is to walk to your car. The early mornings and evenings have milder temperatures, but the humidity of the Eastern Province makes the air very muggy. Yet, despite this weather, I don’t recall feeling like a victim of it, at least not often. This could be my nostalgia romanticizing the past. I do remember that I sometimes wished I lived somewhere with nicer weather. But I think that the family-oriented life that is indispensable to the fabric of society lessened the effect of that weather on people. There is a lot of togetherness in everyday life. Weekly gatherings with the extended family are the norm, with the AC on of course. There are ways to create beautiful memories that don’t involve outdoor activities, and I think I took it for granted when I was younger. But now that I’m living abroad and I have my own small family, I yearn for it more than ever.
For now, I’m learning to bring hygge into my everyday life. A few days before Thanksgiving, I picked up my son from daycare on a cold and rainy day. He cried during our 3-minute walk home. “I don’t like the cold and wind. I want the sun to come out” he told me through tears. “Me too” I told him, and I carried him for the rest of the walk home.
We went inside, and he was still crying. I could see that he was on the verge of having a tantrum. He told me he didn’t want me to pick him up from daycare, and that he wanted to stay there a “long, long time”. Could you tell that my son hates the cold weather? I took a deep breath, and I hugged him and told him that I too missed the sun. I missed the warm weather, and wished the rain would stop. But I told him that, even though I missed those things, I liked certain aspects about winter. I took him to his room and changed him into dry pajamas, and then we came to the living room and turned on the TV to watch Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood. I wrapped my son in a warm blanket and made him some hot chocolate. By the time the episode ended and my son finished his hot chocolate, he was back to being his happy and playful self.
How do you deal with changes in the weather? I’d love to learn your creative ways and ideas of finding and cultivating contentment in your everyday life!