Thanks to our Nordic influence in Northern Michigan, we’ve got the perfect hearty, cozy and joy-filled playbook for making the most of winter Up North.
This article first appeared in Traverse Northern Michigan. Find this story and more when you explore our magazine library. Want Traverse delivered to your door or inbox monthly? View our print subscription and digital subscription options.
You can imagine the jolt of familiarity, the wind that whispered “home” when Scandinavian and Finnish immigrants settled the Northwoods and cold waters of Northern Michigan.
Sea captains, lumberjacks, farmers, winter-hardy souls—thousands flocked to the American Midwest from the Nordic region following a 19th-century population boom that overwhelmed infrastructure and sent many in search of a better life.
More than 150 years later, Michigan ranks near the top of states home to a vibrant population of those of Scandinavian descent. And our “Sauna Belt” is legit: The U.P. claims 50 times more folks with Finnish heritage than the rest of the nation.
They gifted us sturdy work ethics, toasty-hot saunas and strong pickling skills. But above all, they have a knack for embracing and savoring winter. Here, we celebrate the customs and rituals that teach us how not just to survive, but thrive in our darkest season.
My Friend Fika
In the depths of a lonely winter, an afternoon ritual saves the day. by Cara McDonald
During the first full winter of the Covid-19 pandemic, there were three things I was madly grateful for: books, coffee and afternoon skis with my friend Tash. And though I claim no Nordic DNA that I know of, I was fascinated (encouraged?) by the burgeoning interest in Nordic sensibilities—from sisu to hygge to friluftsliv. Resilience, coziness, open-air life: These were things I needed desperately. We all did.
I had just finished a book on sisu, Finnish fortitude and resilience, and moved on to a book about hygge, the Swedish notion of cozy contentedness. It made me think not just, “What about this can I use to hack my life,” but more along the lines of, “How can I steal anything from these pages that will help me get through one more mind-numbing, soul-killing day of remote-learning, home confined hell?”
Fika is a Swedish coffee tradition in which you break for coffee and a dunk-able sweet at 4 p.m. It’s not a coffee break—at least not the way we understand it, clutching a to-go cup or standing over the counter in the office kitchenette. It’s a sit-down-with-a-friend-and-a-snack institution; Swedes call it a state of mind. Even the Volvo factory shuts down for fika. Time stops. Fika (a term that came from playing with the Swedish word for coffee, kaffi) is dependent upon the merging of coffee, pastry and companionship—you can’t fika alone.
Not that I didn’t try, because… Covid. At 4 p.m., I cracked out a chocolate protein bar and a Nespresso latte, then sat down at the kitchen table with a Spotify playlist humming in the background. It created a destination in the middle of what felt like an uninterrupted sea of sameness, hours that stretched forever with little to look forward to. It was also an act of self-kindness when I wasn’t feeling particularly kind. To myself or other selves. It was fika-ish.
But when I shared the idea with my friend Tash, she was on it. Tash is a hippie/school nurse/ gourmet home cook; the kind of friend you want in your corner when you need someone to hook you up with music on vinyl, a Ruth Reichl apple cake recipe or a lice check, not in that order.
“Meet me in the parking lot at the open space,” she said. “I’ve got baked goods.” There had been a good dump of snow and the crosscountry skiing was perfect. I brought the coffee and a can of whipped cream; she brought a basket with apricot scones and Amaretto, wrapped in a red-and-white checkered towel. Tash and I skied until the wind chased us back to our cars, and then hoisted the hatch on her Subaru. We cracked into our coffee and scones, catching up in a socially distant way that felt like salvation. We cackled, got out our quota of adult angst and four-letter words, then refilled our Thermos cups one last time before heading home renewed. We had found our fika.
I still seek out coffee at 4 p.m., even though I’ve moved away from my dear friend and our snowy meadow. It seems a tradition worth adopting and a tiny act of rebellion, to pause at a time when after school meets end of the work day meets what the hell is for dinner, and instead invites pure savoring and connection. When I take the time to do it, my cup is always full.
The Spirit of the Rocks
Entering the shared space of sauna. by Shea Petaja
On my dad’s side of the family, my great aunts and uncles spoke Finnish. It was their secret language among the 13 siblings whose parents emigrated from Finland to the Upper Peninsula. I considered it background noise and was never totally concerned with understanding it. We were allowed to know only a few words beyond our last name. The first, sauna, (pronounced sow-nah). The second, sisu (see-soo). Sisu is the psychological determination when faced with impossible odds. A sauna is the embodiment of sisu, as heat rises and the steam reaches your lungs. You breathe in and breathe out, withstanding the pressure but never escaping.
Our small family lived in what we call “The Little House” right behind my grandparents’ house on the family farm. The first three years of my life, I took a sauna daily—it’s where the shower head was! My parents had a rubber tub on the floor for me. Looking back, that sounds almost barbaric, but I assure you, it’s nostalgic to me and common with Finnish families. My grandfather quit working for The Man (a.k.a. Chrysler in Detroit) to live in Traverse City. Dr. Arnold Sarya, a cousin, recruited them to help build the Glacier Dome on Barlow Street. The dome was the first indoor ice rink that also hosted concerts: Bob Seger, Styx, Johnny Cash, Rush. We are a family of hard workers and hockey players who find solitude in the sauna. Our motto, “First we work, then we play.”
I can remember sitting with my uncles. “Pour more water on the rocks,” they’d command. If we complained? “Go to a lower bench.” If we couldn’t breathe, “Use a wet washcloth to cover your mouth.” We were never told to leave. We stayed until we relaxed into it. My great uncle Burt relaxed so much that he once fell asleep on the top bench only to awake on the floor. He limped for days.
Dr. Sarya’s son, Danny (my third cousin), has kept the Finnish tradition alive by creating MI Sauna, a mobile sauna parked on the east arm of Grand Traverse Bay at the Traverse City State Park beach. A different kind of dome; a community nonetheless. He has visited Finland six times and spent three years researching saunas to create an authentic experience. He laughs, “Noah built the ark; I had to build the sauna.”
Everyone is invited. You sit side-by-side on the basswood benches as the steam reaches a cleansing heat. Löyly, the spirit of the rocks, the life force that rises when cold water meets hot stone, consumes you and the lake outside invites you to take a plunge. Together you withstand and together you submerge yourself in the water. A baptism of sorts.
If you find yourself facing impossible odds, or perhaps seeking community, I welcome you to sit with us.
Cozy in the Season of Light
When the winter winds swirl, hygge adds layers of joy and contentment. by Jacob Wheeler
The night the first snow arrives, we light the candles.
Here in Northern Michigan, it often comes in late November or early December. The air outside is crisp and dry, and our noses—adept at recognizing the changes of seasons—tell us flurries are coming.
Inside we close windows, switch on our Jøtul gas fireplace, cook a butternut squash soup and slather slices of homemade rye bread with creamy butter. My son, Leo, and I dig the traditional cuisine of the Vikings, so we add creamed herring. Sarah and I pour glasses of wine. We light candles and place them on our round dining room table; the flickers become new centers of gravity for our eyes and spirits.
My daughter, Nina, reaches into the hutch and brings out the anglaspel ornament: five small metal trees rotating over one tea candle. Or, if December is here, we light our advent candle to ceremonially burn one notch for each day of the month leading up to Christmas Eve.
All this simple joy, all this coziness, is hygge, a concept central to Danish happiness—or Danish contentment, depending on who you ask in the country of my birth. It’s funny: Each time an international study pronounces Danes as the happiest people on earth, Danes conduct their own internal poll and conclude that we are happy because we hold modest expectations. We’re a small country of less than 6 million. We have cradle-to-grave social welfare. We each play a small role in our society. No need to “pull ourselves up by our bootstraps” and climb socio-economic classes. Happiness is rooted in contentment, sometimes as simple as a candle burning in a window, bracing against the cold darkness outside.
Hygge (roughly pronounced “HOOgah”) is difficult to define. It’s that light, that comfort, that homemade food, that companionship, that pause in our frenetic lives. It’s all of those things, and it can be a hundred other things.
I once interviewed a Danish police officer in his simple, undecorated office in an industrial building for a story about how his unit was combating drug trafficking in a working-class Copenhagen neighborhood. We sat on metal chairs and drank bland coffee from a machine. But after the conversation, he shook my hand and said, “Tak, det var hyggeligt.” Thanks, that was cozy. The definition of the word expands to fit our needs.
Americans and the English boast a particular obsession with hygge, as though the concept satisfies something lacking in our materialistic Anglo cultures. Meik Wiking’s 2017 book The Little Book of Hygge: Danish Secrets to Happy Living quickly became a bestseller in Britain. In the United States, I sometimes learn of “hygge clubs” where people ostensibly get together to practice hygge.
I chuckle to myself. For a Dane like me, that’s like gathering together to intentionally breathe oxygen every few seconds. It’s innate.
In our dining room, the candle burns until bedtime. Before blowing it out, I look out the window and notice a white blanket of winter’s first snow.
The Cold Never Bothered Me, Anyway
With a dose of friluftsliv, winter becomes a friendly playground. by Ashlea Walter
When I moved to Northern Michigan almost twenty-five years ago, I had never seen people leaving their cars running in the store parking lot, and I had never heard of people really embracing the cold and snow of winter, either. It seems that most of us above the knuckle have heard the Midwest adage about the real solution to finally enjoying a long, cold Northern Michigan winter: no such thing as bad weather, just bad clothing.
It’s got to be more than that, though, I thought: the secret to thriving can’t just be not wearing jeans while skiing. It’s almost an annual rite of passage to endure a hard winter, alongside other people mildly complaining at the grocery store while waiting in line to buy a new ice scraper or bag of pet-safe salt for the sidewalk. In that same checkout line, you’ll hear someone offering to wax someone else’s skis and wondering excitedly about when Hickory or Nubs is going to open. Just more evidence of our region’s embrace of friluftsliv, a Norwegian concept that means “open-air living” and can be defined by a love of the outdoors that’s still imbued with coziness.
Sure, in the below-the-knuckle village of Romeo, where I grew up, people around me reveled in the beauty of a fresh snow like a quieting blanket, or even an ice storm that left a glorious but deadly trail in its wake across every single tiny twig. Snow day! But looking forward to being cold again, really getting out in the white stuff up to your knees or gliding across a frozen lake with even more frozen toes, while somehow feeling cozy and joyous at the same time? A movie fantasy.
Fiction, anyway, until I moved to the Empire area and actually met people whose favorite season is winter. It could be due to some of the Scandinavian roots in the area, but without a deep genealogical dive, let’s just say there is a shared Norwegian friluftsliv near and above the 45th Parallel that creeps into frozen bones and creates a spirit of delight in being alive that only adverse weather seems to imbue. One day you’re sledding at the Dune Climb, next thing you know you’re excited about the upcoming Polar Bear Dip when they cut a hole in South Bar Lake. Throw in a sauna and a run into West Bay and, well, you’ve been warned—feeling alive can be addictive. Thanks, Northern Michigan, I’m hooked, alive … and have finally figured out the right clothes, too.
Embracing Hump Day
Right in the midst of a busy week, lillördag offers an oasis of rest, relaxation and fun. by Jacob Wheeler
Wednesdays in Stockholm made an impression on Kate Blondia. The 20-year-old Maple City native, who attends Loyola University in Chicago and works at the restaurant La Becásse when she’s home each summer, studied abroad in Sweden during her junior year of high school.
She observed with curiosity how school would dismiss early on Wednesday afternoons and begin a bit later on Thursday mornings. Her host mother, Marta, worked long hours at a local hospital—particularly when the pandemic arrived in early 2020—but the Pajus family would always gather for dinner on Wednesday evenings, when the adults would drink wine, and together they would watch a movie.
Swedes have long considered hump day in the middle of the week as lillördag, or “little Saturday.” Rather than pushing through to Friday, they break up the work week with a small celebration on Wednesday.
“I noticed that on an individual level and societal level, [Swedes] work together and care for each other more than we tend to here,” Kate told me.
The phrase det löser sig (it’ll work itself out) is something that I think about often because it exemplifies how Swedes think, especially when it comes to lillördag.
“Sure, maybe there are things to get done on a Wednesday night for the next work day, but a break and a time to catch up and check in on friends, family and yourself is just as important.”
Cara McDonald is executive editor of Traverse Northern Michigan magazine.
Shea Petaja is a Traverse City–based writer, speaker and life coach.
Ashlea Walter is an artist and writer who owns Pinkie Finger Press.
Jacob Wheeler is an indie-journalist who publishes the Glen Arbor Sun.