Whether you have spent time on the Internet, watched television or read magazines and newspapers, you must have encountered the word “hygge.” Pronounced “hoo-gah,” the Danish art of feeling good has, particularly since 2016, been the subject of many books and articles.
The growing interest in this universal experience of relating to a place as well as to one another and feeling safe and comforted comes at a time of global instability, a time when hyper-connectivity has turned us into self-centered beings.
The buzz created around hygge also coincides with the UN World Happiness Report (WHR), which announced that Denmark, once again, ranked as the “happiest country in the world.” Yet Denmark is a country with high taxes and long dreary winters ‘so what is the secret behind the Danes’ happiness? Can we find it in hygge? Louisa Thomson Brits “hopes that, in reading this book, you will discover the hygge that already exists in your life and become attuned to its presence.”
The word “hygge” was in fact borrowed from the Norwegians. The concept is linked to the birth of modern Denmark, which was created after the break-up of the Danish empire that extended from Greenland to Iceland, encompassing Norway, southern Sweden, northern Germany and present-day Denmark and the Baltic Islands. The loss of a large territory inspired Nikolaj Frederik Severin Grundtvig to envision his project of 'folkeoplysning'. He believed that national identity was based on a sense of belonging and that Denmark should abandon invasive policies, and seek the well-being and education of all its citizens. The concept of hygge was born between the end of the 19th century and the turn of the 20th when the growing middle classes focused their interest on the comforts of home, domestic life and leisure. Hygge can be described in brief as a harmonious atmosphere, a feeling of warmth and a mood of contentment.
The essence of hygge is the sense and feeling of connection and belonging. Life in Denmark revolves around the community. Danes learn from an early age the importance of connection to their home and their streets. Hygge reflects the way we live in the smallest details. Habits — like the first coffee we drink in the morning, the special perfume we always wear — give us a sense of balance, rootedness and a feeling of well-being.
To hygge is to gather with friends or family members to celebrate the fleeting time or, in other words, to enjoy the moment. In Denmark, people generally gather around a table, and everyone has his own circle of friends. Hygge is about human connection and the family is the first gathering. Family is deeply ingrained in Danish culture. Hygge is a way of showing the members of our family that we care and that we have time to spend with them. We are connected to the whole world; yet many of us are too involved with our WhatsApp, Instagram, email and Facebook to see that our neighbors need some help. To hygge is about making the effort to give one’s time to people and create an atmosphere of tolerance and peace. And whatever the group, everyone has an express duty to include each and every member in a strong sense of relatedness and harmony. It is not accepted for anyone to galvanize the conversation for a long time. If a member of a group displays an inflated ego and takes himself too seriously, he is likely to be teased and warned.
“Within most Danes is a kernel of internalized sanction that keeps their behavior from sliding into self-indulgence or pomposity…There are diverse and subtle ways in which social order is maintained. The Danes are connoisseurs of guilt and commonly use it combined with gentle humor as a non-aggressive deterrent to uphold the quality of human relationships,” wrote Brits.
Hygge is a multi-layered concept where the sense of belonging vies with the experience of shelter and the feelings of comfort, well-being and simplicity. Shelter conveys our basic sense of security. Everyone yearns for a safe home.
Most buildings in Denmark are low rise and streets are wide enough to cross with ease. Large spaces are not seen as inviting. Danish homes are not only practical but they also take into consideration the changing seasons. They welcome the light but they also like to brighten their houses with fireplaces. Many Danes like to spend a weekend or a short vacation in a summerhouse beside the sea or in a cabin on the shore of a lake. The concept of hygge is also strongly linked to comfort, coziness and a relaxed frame of mind. The design of our homes and offices has focused lately more on how they look rather than how they feel. Hygge stresses the importance of handcrafted goods, understated comfort, warmth, natural materials and the use of light.
Danes relate warmth to goodness. Common symbols of hygge such as fireplaces, candlelight, newly baked buns and hot chocolate are connected with the feeling of warmth. Many Danes do not have a fireplace but they make up for it by burning candles. Throughout Scandinavia, candles are lit and placed on windowsills during winter months. And candles on a table convey the idea that we are sitting together.
Danes also give importance to the use of natural materials. The most popular building material is wood combined with stone, brick, copper and concrete. Wooden floors are covered with sisal matting or woolen carpets which exude a feeling of warmth. Danes have a preference for lightweight and mobile furniture that can be easily moved around to welcome unexpected guests. Everyday objects are considered important, and they must be practical and well-made. Special care is given to the design of chairs, which should be as comfortable as possible. Classic Danish coffee tables are elliptical and dining tables are round which draws people together and creates a congenial atmosphere. Danes value good design characterized by beauty, utility, simplicity and quality. Scent is most strongly linked to our emotions. In Denmark, a home is inviting when it smells clean and natural. Hygge is found in the natural smell of flowers, of freshly brewed coffee or newly baked cake.
In fact, sharing a meal is at the heart of hygge. Food in Denmark has always been linked to tradition and time spent in the company of family and friends. Smorrebrod, a typical informal lunch, is prepared in advance so that everyone can enjoy the meal at the same time. New Scandinavian cuisine places emphasis on ingredients that are local and typical of a region’s climate, soil, and water. It has also revived old techniques such as smoking, salting and marinating, and promotes production that is in harmony with the natural resources in fields, the sea, and in the wild.
After all has been said, hygge distinguishes itself by the simplicity it entails. Simplicity is a way of being. Danes enjoy a simple life rather than the visible consumption of branded goods. The concept of hygge is lost if we indulge in luxury goods. Hygge is not a question of qualifications or appearance, but it is about who we are and what we bring to the moment.
In Denmark, hygge is a feeling that “flourishes in any available space in life.” Louisa Thomsen Britts gives us an in-depth look into the art of hygge. It is all about enjoying every instant of every day and connecting with a place and with one another. “Hygge rekindles our awareness of the importance and pleasure of mutuality and celebrates our interconnectedness. It keeps us engaged with the lifelong task of living in intimate and loving relation to the world around us.”
Book Review: ‘The Book of Hygge’ provides insight into Danes’ unbridled happiness
Book Review: ‘The Book of Hygge’ provides insight into Danes’ unbridled happiness
Meaty issue: German political party calls for €4.90 price cap on doner kebabs
- Die Linke appeals to government as price of national favorite hits €10 in some cities
- Scheme would cost taxpayer about €4bn
LONDON: German political party Die Linke has urged the government to cap the price of a much loved food item — the doner kebab.
The party has proposed providing daily vouchers to households that would limit prices to €4.90 ($5.28) and €2.90 for young people under an initiative known as Donerpreisbremse.
The scheme is projected to cost the government about €4 billion.
Introduced after the Second World War by Turkish immigrants who adapted the dish to suit local tastes, the doner kebab is a national favorite in Germany, with an estimated 1.3 billion consumed annually. But their soaring price has become a hot-button political issue.
Die Linke said the cost of a doner kebab had reached €10 in some cities, from €4 just two years ago.
“For young people right now it is an issue as important as where they will move when they leave home,” said Hanna Steinmuller, a lawmaker with the Greens party.
“I know it’s not an everyday issue for many people here … but I think as voter representatives we are obliged to highlight these different perspectives.”
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz was famously confronted by a voter last year who demanded he “speak with Putin … I’m paying €8 for a doner.”
With public pressure mounting, Scholz recently acknowledged on social media that “everywhere I go, mostly by young people, I get asked if there should be a price cap for doner kebabs.”
Despite the appeals, the chancellor rejected the proposal, citing the impracticality of price controls in a free market economy.
Despite its humble origins as a street food, the doner kebab has become an unexpected point of political focus.
Last month, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier sparked controversy when on a visit to Turkiye he gifted 60 kg of kebab meat from Berlin to Istanbul in what some called a clumsy attempt to symbolize the strong cultural ties between the two nations.
A 98-year-old in Ukraine walked miles to safety from Russians, with slippers and a cane
- Describing her journey, the nonagenarian said she had fallen twice and was forced to stop to rest at some points, even sleeping along the way before waking up and continuing her journey
KYIV, Ukraine: A 98-year-old woman in Ukraine who escaped Russian-occupied territory by walking almost 10 kilometers (6 miles) alone, wearing a pair of slippers and supported by a cane has been reunited with her family days after they were separated while fleeing to safety.
Lidia Stepanivna Lomikovska and her family decided to leave the frontline town of Ocheretyne, in the eastern Donetsk region, last week after Russian troops entered it and fighting intensified.
Russians have been advancing in the area, pounding Kyiv’s depleted, ammunition-deprived forces with artillery, drones and bombs.
“I woke up surrounded by shooting all around — so scary,” Lomikovska said in a video interview posted by the National Police of Donetsk region.
In the chaos of the departure, Lomikovska became separated from her son and two daughters-in-law, including one, Olha Lomikovska, injured by shrapnel days earlier. The younger family members took to back routes, but Lydia wanted to stay on the main road.
With a cane in one hand and steadying herself using a splintered piece of wood in the other, the pensioner walked all day without food and water to reach Ukrainian lines.
Describing her journey, the nonagenarian said she had fallen twice and was forced to stop to rest at some points, even sleeping along the way before waking up and continuing her journey.
“Once I lost balance and fell into weeds. I fell asleep … a little, and continued walking. And then, for the second time, again, I fell. But then I got up and thought to myself: “I need to keep walking, bit by bit,’” Lomikovska said.
Pavlo Diachenko, acting spokesman for the National Police of Ukraine in the Donetsk region, said Lomikovska was saved when Ukrainian soldiers spotted her walking along the road in the evening. They handed her over to the “White Angels,” a police group that evacuates citizens living on the front line, who then took her to a shelter for evacuees and contacted her relatives.
“I survived that war,’ she said referring to World War II. “I had to go through this war too, and in the end, I am left with nothing.
“That war wasn’t like this one. I saw that war. Not a single house burned down. But now – everything is on fire,” she said to her rescuer.
In the latest twist to the story, the chief executive of one of Ukraine’s largest banks announced on his Telegram channel Tuesday that the bank would purchase a house for the pensioner.
“Monobank will buy Lydia Stepanivna a house and she will surely live in it until the moment when this abomination disappears from our land,” Oleh Horokhovskyi said.
Amazon Purr-rime: Cat accidentally shipped to online retailer
- Galena was found safe by a warehouse worker at an Amazon center after vanishing from her home in Utah
LOS ANGELES: A curious cat that sneaked into an open box was shipped across the United States to an Amazon warehouse after its unknowing owners sealed it inside.
Carrie Clark’s pet, Galena, vanished from her Utah home on April 10, sparking a furious search that involved plastering “missing” posters around the neighborhood.
But a week later, a vet hundreds of miles (kilometers) away in Los Angeles got in touch to say the cat had been discovered in a box — alongside several pairs of boots — by a warehouse worker at an Amazon center.
“I ran to tell my husband that Galena was found and we broke down upon realizing that she must have jumped into an oversized box that we shipped out the previous Wednesday,” Clark told KSL TV in Salt Lake City.
“The box was a ‘try before you buy,’ and filled with steel-toed work boots.”
Clark and her husband jetted to Los Angeles, where they discovered Amazon employee Brandy Hunter had rescued Galena — a little hungry and thirsty after six days in a cardboard box, but otherwise unharmed.
“I could tell she belonged to someone by the way she was behaving,” said Hunter, according to Amazon.
“I took her home that night and went to the vet the next day to have her checked for a microchip, and the rest is history.”
What did people eat before agriculture? New study offers insight
- Analysis of forms — or isotopes — of elements including carbon, nitrogen, zinc, sulfur and strontium in these remains indicated the type and amount of plants and meat they ate
WASHINGTON: The advent of agriculture roughly 11,500 years ago in the Middle East was a milestone for humankind — a revolution in diet and lifestyle that moved beyond the way hunter-gatherers had existed since Homo sapiens arose more than 300,000 years ago in Africa.
While the scarcity of well-preserved human remains from the period preceding this turning point has made the diet of pre-agricultural people a bit of a mystery, new research is now providing insight into this question. Scientists reconstructed the dietary practices of one such culture from North Africa, surprisingly documenting a heavily plant-based diet.
The researchers examined chemical signatures in bones and teeth from the remains of seven people, as well as various isolated teeth, from about 15,000 years ago found in a cave outside the village of Taforalt in northeastern Morocco. The people were part of what is called the Iberomaurusian culture.
Analysis of forms — or isotopes — of elements including carbon, nitrogen, zinc, sulfur and strontium in these remains indicated the type and amount of plants and meat they ate. Found at the site were remains from different edible wild plants including sweet acorns, pine nuts, pistachio, oats and legumes called pulses. The main prey, based on bones discovered at the cave, was a species called Barbary sheep.
“The prevailing notion has been that hunter-gatherers’ diets were primarily composed of animal proteins. However, the evidence from Taforalt demonstrates that plants constituted a big part of the hunter-gatherers’ menu,” said Zineb Moubtahij, a doctoral student in archaeology at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany and lead author of the study published on Monday in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.
“It is important as it suggests that possibly several populations in the world already started to include substantial amount of plants in their diet” in the period before agriculture was developed, added archeogeochemist and study co-author Klervia Jaouen of the French research agency CNRS.
The Iberomaurusians were hunter-gatherers who inhabited parts of Morocco and Libya from around 25,000 to 11,000 years ago. Evidence indicates the cave served as a living space and burial site.
These people used the cave for significant portions of each year, suggesting a lifestyle more sedentary than simply roaming the landscape searching for resources, the researchers said. They exploited wild plants that ripened at different seasons of the year, while their dental cavities illustrated a reliance on starchy botanical species.
Edible plants may have been stored by the hunter-gatherers year-round to guard against seasonal shortages of prey and ensure a regular food supply, the researchers said.
These people ate only wild plants, the researchers found. The Iberomaurusians never developed agriculture, which came relatively late to North Africa.
“Interestingly, our findings showed minimal evidence of seafood or freshwater food consumption among these ancient groups. Additionally, it seems that these humans may have introduced wild plants into the diets of their infants at an earlier stage than previously believed,” Moubtahij said.
“Specifically, we focused on the transition from breastfeeding to solid foods in infants. Breast milk has a unique isotopic signature, distinct from the isotopic composition of solid foods typically consumed by adults.”
Two infants were among the seven people whose remains were studied. By comparing the chemical composition of an infant’s tooth, formed during the breastfeeding period, with the composition of bone tissue, which reflects the diet shortly before death, the researchers discerned changes in the baby’s diet over time. The evidence indicated the introduction of solid foods at around the age of 12 months, with babies weaned earlier than expected for a pre-agricultural society.
North Africa is a key region for studying Homo sapiens evolution and dispersal out of Africa.
“Understanding why some hunter-gatherer groups transitioned to agriculture while others did not can provide valuable insights into the drivers of agricultural innovation and the factors that influenced human societies’ decisions to adopt new subsistence strategies,” Moubtahij said.
Palestinian prisoner in Israel wins top fiction prize
- The mask in the novel’s title refers to the blue identity card that Nur, an archaeologist living in a refugee camp in Ramallah, finds in the pocket of an old coat belonging to an Israeli
ABU DHABI: Palestinian writer Basim Khandaqji, jailed 20 years ago in Israel, won a prestigious prize for Arabic fiction on Sunday for his novel “A Mask, the Color of the Sky.”
The award of the 2024 International Prize for Arabic Fiction was announced at a ceremony in Abu Dhabi.
The prize was accepted on Khandaqji’s behalf by Rana Idriss, owner of Dar Al-Adab, the book’s Lebanon-based publisher.
Khandaqji was born in the Israeli-occupied West Bank city of Nablus in 1983, and wrote short stories until his arrest in 2004 at the age of 21.
He was convicted and jailed on charges relating to a deadly bombing in Tel Aviv, and completed his university education from inside jail via the Internet.
The mask in the novel’s title refers to the blue identity card that Nur, an archaeologist living in a refugee camp in Ramallah, finds in the pocket of an old coat belonging to an Israeli.
Khandaqji’s book was chosen from 133 works submitted to the competition.
Nabil Suleiman, who chaired the jury, said the novel “dissects a complex, bitter reality of family fragmentation, displacement, genocide, and racism.”
Since being jailed Khandaqji has written poetry collections including “Rituals of the First Time” and “The Breath of a Nocturnal Poem.”
He has also written three earlier novels.
