Hygge (pronounced hue-guh) is a Danish word used when acknowledging a feeling or moment, whether alone or with friends, at home or out, ordinary or extraordinary as cozy, charming or special.

The first snow of the season is falling. Settled in my cabin with a cup of tea, I look out on the branches that had just recently held such spectacular fall colors but are now barren except for a faint dusting of white. Inside these ordinary pine walls and surrounded by ash, hickory, and cottonwood, I feel the extraordinary assurance of home wash over me. This is hygge.

In The Book of Hygge: The Danish Art of Living Well, author Louisa Thomsen Brits writes:

We all hygger: gathered around a table for a shared meal or beside a fire on a dark night, when we sit in the corner of our local café or wrap ourselves in a blanket at the end of a day on the beach. . . baking in a warm kitchen, bathing by candlelight, being alone in bed with a hot water bottle and a good book–these are all ways to hygge.

Hygge draws meaning from the fabric of ordinary living. It’s a way of acknowledging the sacred in the secular, of giving something ordinary a special context, spirit and warmth and taking time to make it extraordinary.

Decades before I had ever heard the word hygge, I lived it. Both my mother and father framed my world, so that I learned to see the sacred in the secular, to give the ordinary a special context, to make it extraordinary. As a child, I spent hours transforming the ordinary stuff of my life into new worlds with marvelous possibilities. I combed the alley behind our house for treasure: unusual rocks, pieces of colored glass, violets that grew among the weeds around the garbage cans. And on Friday evenings with TV trays of hamburgers and chips, I felt our home was particularly cozy and special.

When I was in third grade and my father was finishing his PhD work, my family moved to Lincoln, Nebraska for a year. I attended the laboratory school on the University of Nebraska campus, a school with a small fenced gravel playground behind it. Each recess, a group of girls and I worked in the corner of the playground as others played kickball and jumped rope. With the edges of our shoes, we scraped the gravel bare in places, making piles of crushed rock to outline the houses we were creating. We made rooms with aquariums that we populated with rock fish. We made lamps from sticks. We piled and formed gravel into sofas and beds and chairs. Day after day, we didn’t know that we were making do; we only counted the minutes until recess, until our ordinary corner of the playground would become magical once again.

Louis Thomsen Brits claims that an essential ingredient to hygge is the boundary that marks a place or delineates a moment—a fence, a circle of cushions or a stolen half hour. My friends and I created boundaries of gravel that, even today, mark those 8-year-old moments as hygge.

Sir Thomas Moore, saint, philosopher, and statesman writes: Things sing when they reach a certain degree of presence. Hygge demands presence, insists upon being rather than doing. For regardless of their beauty or worth, things are simply things when we are not wholly present. They whisper but do not sing. They line the periphery of our hours, silhouettes of what might be. But when we are truly present, when we carve out moments of conscious being, things sing the glorious hymns of hygge.

Perhaps there is something especially suitable for hygge in this season of blankets, hot chocolate, firelight, and the winter world shining outside a frosted window. But hygge is not dependent upon warm houses. In her letters to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a minister, essayist and eminent Bostonian, Emily Dickinson writes: I felt it shelter to speak to you. Hygge may live in the intimate words you share with another, words that feel, indeed, like shelter in a world of noise. It may reside in lines of verse that live in the pockets of your soul. And it may take shape in a single word: your name spoken knowingly by another.

Rainer Maria Rilke understood that hygge finds its greatest truth in the presence of God. So, I’ll let him have the final words.

I’m too alone in the world, yet not alone enough

to make each hour holy.

I’m too small in the world, yet not small enough

to be simply in your presence, like a thing–

just as it is.

I want to know my own will

and to move with it.

And I want, in the hushed moments

when the nameless draws near,

to be among the wise ones–

or alone.

I want to mirror your intensity.

I want never to be too weak or too old

to bear the heavy, lurching image of you.

I want to unfold.

Let no place in me hold itself closed,

for where I am closed, I am false.

I want to stay clear in your sight.

                                            Rainer Maria Rilke, Books of Hours