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Much to my surprise, I seem to have become a Viking. Not a marauding seafarer who decamps with all your valuables, leaving casualties in his wake, but a modern hyggeligt (hoo-ga-ly) Viking, who loves cinnamon buns and candles.
I have a smidgen of Danish ancestry from a lone Danish great-great-grandfather, but that never seemed of much interest until visiting Copenhagen seven years ago. Some cog in my being seemed to shift during that first trip. We've been back to Denmark three times since then.
On these dark mornings, you will now find candles flickering as we read the newspapers. How cheerfully charming candles were at breakfast in Copenhagen and how easy to adopt at home.
Cinnamon buns appear on our kitchen table fragrant with that beloved Scandinavian spice, cardamom and crunchy with raw sugar on top. The table will be spread with a simple pink and white checked tablecloth made from an affordable Ikea fabric. Tea to accompany these buns will be poured from a blue and white Royal Copenhagen teapot, a modern interpretation of a traditional design.
When baking, I used to be intimidated by yeast, but not any more. I have ventured beyond ancestral English hot cross buns to cinnamon buns made with fresh baker's yeast to rye bread, spelt buns and delectable brunsviger, which has an irresponsible but yummy quantity of butter and sugar. My friend Michael says that I have good buns.
A much more quotidian Danish pleasure is homemade sourdough rye bread. Breakfasts in the hotel on Vesterbrogade in Copenhagen were a revelation, but it was the delicious chewiness of the rye bread that captivated me. A helpful hotel employee told me that the secret used by farming wives was their sourdough starter. This set me on a quest for recipes and kickstarted my Scandinavian cookery book collection. I now have a baking repertoire of sourdough rye (some made plain, some with anise, fennel and caraway seeds), a seeded rye bread packed with poppy, sunflower, pumpkin, flax and black sesame seeds, and a fragrant rye with orange zest. Yum.
Could there be some ancestral taste for Scandi flavours lurking in my DNA? I love that sweet, earthy smell of sourdough starter as it bubbles in its jar. I love the scent of rye bread as I unwrap it for use. And then there's the toppings! Pickled herring anyone?
It's not just the food that my husband and I adopted, however much we may enjoy homemade gravlax or smorrebrod (open-faced sandwiches). In summer months, for example, it seems logical to fold the bedding to the foot of the bed, leaving the uncovered sheets to air. Blue and white china has multiplied in the cupboards. We've twice celebrated the longest day of the year on June 24, St. John's Eve, with a Scandi-feast, but the evening also includes a miniature bonfire on the patio. It's really just a couple of tea lights nestled in sand held in a glass bowl, but guests have relished burning tiny witch-like depictions of the worst things haunting them from the previous year. We send each guest home with a tiny paper outline drawing of a butterfly to remind them of hopes for the next year.
Learning Danish seemed like the logical next step. I was fortunate enough to study German for five years at high school, so Danish wasn't as big a stretch as it might have been. My trusty little Duolingo app coaxes me into new letters, sounds and vocabulary and, over the past 18 months, I have, supposedly, become 60-per-cent fluent in Danish. At the very least, I'm building new synapses with these new words that connect not only to German, but also to the ancient origins of English. How proud my great-great-grandfather would be.
There has been a proliferation of stories about hygge recently, but my husband and I first came across this word four years ago from an enthusiastic walking-tour guide in Copenhagen. He was a young peripatetic Australian who'd been in Denmark for about a year.
He couldn't restrain his enthusiasm for this concept, but made no mention of Scandinavian design as being part of it. He talked of feelings, coziness, personal warmth, acts of kindness and relaxed hospitality. It seemed to hit a chord with us because it's a word that expresses values that are so admirable and embracing. As the word's popularity and adoption of the concept spreads, we've noticed another Scandinavian word popping up: lagom, Swedish for balance. Undeterred, we continue to embrace hygge and all that it stands for, it's in our hearts and we hope to keep it there.
My husband says that I have been finding my inner Viking. It's all been incremental, but has gradually increased: I note the 11 Scandinavian cookbooks and five design books on the shelf; the earrings and a pendant I've added to the Baltic amber necklace I bought in Copenhagen; and complementing my grandmother's 1950s Georg Jensen brooch with a new Jensen bracelet featuring an enamelled daisy, Queen Margrethe's favourite flower.
Sometimes, I find it hard to believe that this Australian-Canadian of mostly British descent could so easily have adopted the habits of Danes and other Nordic peoples. I didn't intend to do so, but one thing led to another. It all started to make sense when my aunt had her DNA tested and we discovered that her ethnicity mix is 44 per cent Scandinavian, probably Norse settlers since all of her known genealogy is English, Scottish and Irish.
Perhaps there's more to my inner Viking than I realized, so I'm passing it on. Over the holidays, I made pepparkakor, or gingerbread cookies, with my son and my niece. We had a lot of fun decorating them together. It seems the beginning of a new tradition and even the re-Danishing of the family.
Amanda Towe lives in Oakville, Ont.