My Top 7 Favorite Hygge Holiday Family Traditions
If you are hoping to create a cozy and meaningful Christmas feeling this season, then enjoy these 7 ideas for holiday hygge traditions that are sure to get you in the holiday mood.
What makes us long for the holiday season throughout the year? What is it about the days between Thanksgiving and Christmas day that create a child-like sense of anticipation? In a modern world filled with hectic schedules and the unpredictability of the social, cultural and political climate, the holiday season is a much needed and longed for season each year.
As a child, we couldn’t wait until Christmas day when there were surprises awaiting us under the Christmas tree. What we don’t realize as children, who get wrapped up in the magical story of Christmas and a jolly old elf who brings us gifts, is that the things that actually make the holiday season magical are all of the traditions we build and experience year-after-year. Once we reach adulthood, we realize that the joy and excitement of the holiday season is created by all of the activities leading up to the actual day, not on the actual day itself.
In order to capture the feelings of magic, nostalgia, joy and contentment that we felt as children, we need to be intentional about both creating and repeating holiday traditions each year with our families. Designing a holiday season around the principles of togetherness, connectedness and indulgence of simple pleasures are the cornerstones to a hygge holiday.
If you’d like your holiday season to be more meaningful and cozy, then you’re sure to be inspired by these 7 hygge holiday traditions that my family and I enjoy year after year.
What is hygge?
You may be asking yourself:
“What is hygge and what the heck does it have to do with the holiday season?”
Hygge is a Danish word for which we don’t have an equivalent word for in the English language. Critical to the Danish culture, “hygge” is defined as a way of living in which you purposefully design a life of coziness, connectedness and contentment. The most recognizable author on hygge and researcher of how to be happy Meik Weiking defines hygge as:
“The art of creating intimacy”
Meik Weiking
“Coziness of the soul”
“The absence of annoyance”
“Taking pleasure in the presence of soothing things”
If you close your eyes and think about getting cozy, you may imagine yourself cuddled under a blanket, sitting by a fireplace, sipping on a hot drink, reading a good book or watching a movie. It is typically activities and things like this that we choose to do in order to help ourselves feel safe, calm, and content. This is the essence of hygge.
You may get these same feelings of safety, peace and fulfillment when you enjoy the company of your closest friends and family doing the things you mutually enjoy. When you share hygge activities, you add in the essential hygge feeling of togetherness and connection.
At the center of the meaning of hygge and, in turn, the meaning of a hygge holiday, is the creation of a feeling by the pursuit of things that you value the most.
How do you say hygge?
Before we continue with our discussion of the meaning of a hygge holiday, let’s get something important out of the way: how the heck do you even say “hygge”?
While I like to think of the word like “hug”, it’s actually pronounced “hoo-guh”. That’s right, get in there and get throaty with it! If you feel too silly to pronounce it correctly, I suppose you can Americanize it and say “high-g”, but I personally love the way the word feels in the back of my throat!
What is the meaning of a hygge holiday?
A hygge holiday is simply applying the principles of a hygge life to the holiday season. A hygge holiday is best achieved if you focus on creating an atmosphere or feeling. While you will need things, people and activities to have a hygge holiday, they won’t, in and of themselves, create a true hygge holiday. You experience a hygge holiday when you intentionally seek out things, people and activities that give you that hygge holiday feeling.
That hygge holiday feeling (Christmas vibes)
Before we dive into how to create a hygge holiday, let’s try and define what a hygge holiday actually feels like. I think it would be easiest if we started in the past. Let’s visit the ‘ghost of Christmas past” and try to remember what it felt like to have that “Christmas feeling” as a child.
One of my most favorite memories of the holiday season as a child were all of the beautiful Christmas lights that people put on their homes. All month long, driving anywhere, you could get a Christmas feeling just peering out the car window at everyone’s unique light and yard decorations. I felt a sense of awe when looking at a line of homes lit up by holiday lights.
Another memory from my childhood is waiting in line to see Santa Claus. As I waited in line for my turn, I always became filled with an intense sense of excitement and anticipation.
Throughout my childhood and to this day, my mother would tape all of the Christmas cards we received from family and friends around our kitchen door frame. Each one of these cards was an opportunity for my parents to share with us all of the people that had touched their lives at one point or another. It was a physical representation of a feeling of connectedness.
When I was a child, before netflix and streaming services, we would plan out our evenings based on the cable tv schedule of holiday movies they would show. Sitting down to watch these classic movies as a family always made me feel cozy and nostalgic.
I came from a musical family and grew up with a piano in the home. While my father played the piano from time to time throughout the rest of the year, Christmas-time was filled with the sounds of Christmas music from our piano and voices. Gathering around the piano to sing Christmas songs and hymns always filled me with great joy.
Probably my most favorite thing about the holidays as a child was all the goodies! I am a sucker for a baked good, and Christmas-time my mother and grandmother would pull out all the stops to bake some of the most delicious treats. The best part was that rules about limits on sweets went out the door allowing me to feel indulgent.
That Christmas Feeling
So how do you create a hygge holiday? Well, it’s actually quite simple! Do exactly what I just said:
unashamedly pursue all things joyful
Create and take advantage of every opportunity to make yourself and your family feel a sense of contentment by immersing yourself in activities that bring you together and remind you of all of your best and most joyful times. You can do this by creating and repeating hygge holiday traditions as a family year after year.
Here are 7 of my family’s most favorite hygge holiday traditions.
Hygge Holiday Tradition # 1: Cutting down your own Christmas tree
Every year, the weekend after Thanksgiving, my family and I cut down our own Christmas tree. While it is more expensive, more work and more difficult to maintain than an artificial tree, the memories are well worth it!. As someone who grew up with a gorgeous artificial tree filled with white lights and crystal ornaments, taking care of a real Christmas tree, let alone cutting down our own, was a bit of a change. There have been years where more than half of the tree was dead before we even got to Christmas day. I remember a year when the branches were so soft that they couldn’t hold many of our ornaments, dropping many of them to the ground. But despite all of this and the extra effort, I wouldn’t do it any other way.
Oftentimes, if you find a Christmas tree farm, they will also have other activities you can do that same day to make it even more fun. Cutting our tree begins with a trip behind a tractor out to one of the fields. My girls and I go frolicking up and down rows and rows of trees pointing out and critiquing all types of trees until we find just the right one.
At this point, my job is over! My husband gets the joy of getting on the ground (that is either wet with snow or mud) and sawing the tree out of the ground.
We get to take another ride behind the tractor back to the main barn where the kids can play on the playground. Finally we move into the barn to get snacks, hot cocoa and candy canes.
Once we get home we allow the tree to fall for a few hours, enjoy Thanksgiving leftovers and then add lights. The next day, we blast the holiday music to create the Christmas vibes and decorate the Christmas tree as a family. Pulling each ornament out of the box always incites lots of questions from my girls and reminiscing from everyone.
While cutting down our own Christmas tree is an important hygge holiday tradition in and of itself, it’s really just the catalyst to so many other traditions that get us in the holiday mood!
Holiday Hygge Tradition # 2: Decorating Together
As I mentioned above, we love to get the Christmas vibes going by blasting some holiday music and treating ourselves to some comfort food as we decorate as a family. While tree decorating is a whole family affair, decorating the rest of the house is typically something my husband bows out of. It’s just not really his thing…go figure!
My girls will beg me to put the holiday decorations up earlier and earlier each year, and sometimes I indulge them. My oldest daughter was born the day before Thanksgiving, so she can often convince me that decorating for Christmas is something we have to do for her birthday.
While we love the holiday hygge aesthetic that our collection of decorations creates in our home each year, it’s the memories that they incite that really creates that Christmas feeling. Memories are an important part of a hygge holiday because they connect our past and present. By using the same decorations year after year, we build a connection with those decorations through the memories that they elicit.
It’s the sharing of those memories as a family that makes decorating together such an important part of a hygge holiday
Hygge Holiday Tradition # 3: Homemade Holiday Decorations
What could create more meaning and connection than homemade Christmas decorations? It is common to have quite a few homemade ornaments from when your children were younger, as school often helps them create these things. But think about how much meaning, joy and connection we could create each year by making homemade holiday decorations together and then setting them out each year.
Sitting down to be creative together will build excitement and anticipation for that year’s festivities. It can also create the opportunity for your family to talk about what you may want your hygge holiday to look like that year: things to add, things to try, things to retire.
Homemade decorations will become heirlooms that your children can take with them once they are old enough to be on their own. They become stories to tell their own children and help them stay connected to their memories and traditions.
Holiday Hygge Tradition # 4: Holiday Treats
I’ve already confessed to my love of holiday baked goods. I am the Christmas cookie queen! My husband often has to edit my list of cookies so that I don’t spend the whole season in the kitchen baking (and adding inches to all of our waistlines!). I typically make a few of the cookies my mom always made growing up and a mix of cookies I’ve developed from my family’s and my own preferences.
Here are some of my favorite Holiday Cookies:
As my girls get older, they participate more and more in the baking of holiday treats, but we have always made sugar cookie decorating a hygge holiday tradition. I will bake 3-4 dozen cut-out cookies a few days in advance and make tons of icing in different colors for decoration day. We will sit down together and compete for the best decorated cookie, and the most “unique” looking cookie. Our cookie decorating tradition is full of a lot of laughs and creates a lot of shared joy.
Now, if you are my husband, he will tell you his favorite thing about holiday treats is getting to eat them. I can’t disagree there. There is something about indulging on Christmas cookies that feels so freeing!
Hygge Holiday Tradition # 5: Holiday Movie Marathon
Watching Holiday movies now is a lot different from when I was a kid. We had to make sure we planned things just right to catch all the movies we wanted to see when the tv channels were airing them. Nowadays, you can watch your holiday movie favorites whenever you want.
Some of our favorite family holiday movies include:
- Elf
- A White Christmas
- Home Alone (1 & 2)
- Rudolph
- It’s a Wonderful Life
- How the Grinch Stole Christmas (So many to choose from now!)
- Frosty the Snowman
- Miracle on 34th Street
- The Santa Claus
I could go on forever….!!
Watching our favorite movies must include a holiday hygge aesthetic. We turn on our fireplace, light candles, get out ALL of our coziest blankets and make mugs of hot cocoa. A holiday movie marathon creates the ultimate cozy Christmas feeling.
This tradition always reminds me how the simple things that include the most important people in my life (my husband and children) are all I need to have the best hygge holiday season.
Holiday Hygge Tradition # 6: Family Game Nights
Family game night is something that we do on Christmas eve as a small family of 4. When our girls were babies and toddlers, we used to truck them around to everyone’s holiday gatherings. As they have gotten older, they request more and more to keep our hygge holiday traditions more simple and intimate. When they turned 6 and 7, they asked if we could do a family game night on Christmas eve. From that year on, it is something that we do and build on each year.
Our Christmas eve tradition is built around enjoying family board games and nintendo games, but it has grown to include more and more activities each year. We choose a comforting dinner to cook and eat as a family. We may bake some fresh cookies to set out for Santa. A Holiday movie has been known to be watched on that day. We will often wrap our gifts to each other as well as exchange our gifts to each other on this day. New holiday pajamas, sometimes matching (often not), are wrapped and opened right before bed time.
Family Game Night is a hygge holiday tradition that allows us all to be present with each other in a deep and meaningful way. My guess is these memories will be even more important to my girls as they get older than those created on Christmas mornings.
Hygge Holiday Tradition # 7: Enjoy the Winter Weather
This is a hard holiday tradition to stick to each year. My family lives in upstate NY where the weather is sometimes snowy and sometimes in the 60s. It’s hard to tell if we’ll get a white Christmas or not. But on the years that we do get snow, my girls make their own version of “Frosty”. Even if there is an inch of snow (or sometimes less) they will create a snowman they lovingly named “Branchy” and painstakingly add details to him to bring him to life.
While building a snowman is a great hygge holiday tradition, any activity you do in nature during the holiday season is sure to get you in the hygge holiday mood. Enjoying nature is a key aspect of the Danish hygge culture and way of living. It is often the activity you do after enjoying nature that is the most hygge, or cozy.
Here are some simple ideas to get out and enjoy nature during the holidays:
Bonus Holiday Hygge Tradition: Engage the Senses with hygge candles
If you ask any Dane, they will tell you there can be no hygge without candles. Here in America, we too love our holiday hygge scented candles. Purchase a bunch for your home and light them whenever you want. Indulge in this hygge holiday tradition and get yourself in the holiday mood.
Design Hygge Holiday Traditions that get you in the holiday mood
I hope that you feel inspired to design your own hygge holiday traditions this year. Whether you enjoy some of the same traditions that my family and I do or create your own hygge holiday traditions, make sure you focus on creating a Christmas feeling. Sometimes the things that bring the most Christmas feelings are things that have nothing to do with Christmas at all.
It is creating memories, connection, joy and contentedness around these activities and traditions that will make them a part of your hygge holiday. Whatever gets you into the hygge holiday mood and creates that cozy Christmas feeling for you and your family is exactly what you should be doing! Indulge and feel no guilt! That’s what a hygge holiday is all about.
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