The brutal cold of Sweden’s winters is well documented, but Stockholm has a knack for bringing some special magic even to its gloomiest season. The city, located just 500 miles south of the Arctic Circle, enjoys as little as six hours of daylight during the bleakest months, with the peak of darkness occurring at the winter solstice on December 21—and it’s no coincidence that this is when Stockholm fills with fairy-lit streets and cozy dining rooms illuminated with candles and roaring fireplaces. Add a whole host of invigorating winter activities, from ice-skating on frozen lakes to plunging through holes drilled in the frozen Baltic Sea, and you’ll see why many Swedes claim this as their favorite time of year.
“Winter is a time to hunker down, cook and play vinyl records; to wear something cozy and breathe the crisp outdoor air; to heat up the sauna, cut a hole in the ice, and—well, don’t even get me started on how much I love cold-water plunges!” exclaims Hanna Oscarsson, the creative director at Stockholm’s most celebrated cocktail bar, Röda Huset.
“Cooling off on a hot summer day is wonderful too, of course,” she continues. “But winter dips are like a deep breath to reset the constant, hectic pace of modern life.”
Nowhere does cozy like Sweden—so much so that they even have a special word for it. Mys is Swedish for that feeling you get when you curl up under a soft blanket on a deep-cushioned sofa next to a fireplace, your hands wrapped around a giant cup of hot chocolate, or when you wrap up in your thickest knits and mittens and head out for a bracing walk along winter-lit streets, a soft dusting of snow creaking under your boots. It’s not entirely unrelated to what the Danes call hygge—but where hygge has hardened into an international lifestyle aesthetic, mys remains purely a state of mind.
I grew up in Sweden and toughed it out for 20-or-so years until the darkness got the better of me, prompting me to move to Barcelona and never look back. So imagine my surprise earlier this year, when my feed suddenly filled with Swedish “coolcations”, as the whole of southern Europe fled north to escape the stifling heat. “That’s cool,” I thought to myself, but you don’t really know Sweden until you’ve tasted the cold. So grab your furriest coat and woolliest hat, because when it comes to winter wonderlands, nowhere does it quite like Stockholm.
