Wednesday evenings for me at the moment are all church based, and will be for the foreseeable future.

From Easter I’m running monthly groups for the church family or friends to come to: a Bring Your Own Book one, a Wholly Holy Book group, a monthly meet up and sing for the annual Christmas Choir and a worship-through-art one. One a week, on a fixed Wednesday, so the art session, for example, will always be on the first Wednesday, the BYOB group on the second etc.

But currently my Wednesdays (unless I was ill) have been spent at the study groups. The sermon series this term has been about serving, loving, walking alongside others in church and in the outside world. Wednesday group work has followed on from the sermon, which is so useful. You listen on a Sunday and on Wednesday discuss how to apply what you heard to life in general or your life in particular. We’ve had sessions based on forgiveness, admonishing each other and forgiveness but this week’s was on hospitality.

I’m all in favour of hospitality, and of broadening the definition of hospitality which many seem to inevitably distil down into food and drink. It’s quite likely that most hospitality will include an element of that, but what struck me last night was how hygge and hospitality have this broad overlap.

Hospitality is an act of caring, of providing a home even if just for an hour. It can involve food, it can involve space to sleep or rest for a friend in need. Andrea Nwabuike describes it as “a posture of kindness; the habit of inviting others to be at home in our presence”, and goes on to describe the hospitality of her family and friends on a plane when she herself was feeling ill. It’s an act that requires sharing; as Rosaria Butterfield puts it “We practice hospitality by sharing our resources and our needs, by serving as both host and guest, as Jesus did when he walked this earth. Hospitality works on the same principle as tithing. You are either giving, or you are receiving. You are either building up the body, or you need the body to build you up. All of us have a stake in hospitality because Jesus does.”

Most religions are called on to practise hospitality in one way or another. Perhaps a mark of our consumerist, ownership economy is that western Christians have to remind themselves of the gifts that offering and receiving hospitality provides and purposefully set out to provide it, while opening one’s home in other parts of the world is as natural as breathing. We’ve outsourced the hospitality to such an extent that when you mention the word now, most people think hotels, restaurants and function rooms. We probably need to pull it back into the home.

And last night we discussed our best memories, our future intentions and how we, in a nice middle class area of Liverpool, can embody hospitality ourselves.

The best hospitality, I thought as I sat and listened to Lizzie, our Vicar, is based on hyggerian principles.

• Don’t Try to be Impressive. A fantastic meal made from scratch or hiring a Palace to hold your party doesn’t create an atmosphere of hospitality, especially if (as we said last night) the host or hostess spends all the time jumping up and down to check on the food, pour more drinks, tamper with the temperature or otherwise fuss over the hospitality on offer. It’s also not hospitable or hygge if they tell you exactly how much every mouthful costs, or what the bottle is worth or even how far down the Nile they had to go to source the finest Nile crocodile eggs for the party.
• Do keep any food and drink at a level you don’t need to stress about. Make it in advance, buy it in, keep the choice limited. Accept any mistakes or mishaps gracefully and be generous in serving. If the meal on offer doesn’t make you wince at the cost of every bite, and there is enough for everyone with lunch for you the next day left over, you’ve pitched it right.

• A small group is more hospitable. Big parties are lovely, yes, but there’s a reason round tables are the table of choice especially at weddings. They fit no more than 8 to 10, allow for everyone to see and talk to everyone else, and limit the number of people in each huddle. In home groups, and most other hospitable situations, being able to limit groups to 10 or less pays off in terms of how much talking can go on between the guests. And talking leads to friendship leads to the ideal situation to…
• Create an atmosphere of trust and openness. Make sure everyone there knows that discussions are private, or alternatively that discussions are so open they will be repeated outside. Both work, for different reasons, in different situations. What doesn’t work is chopping and changing within a group so that chat this week is open to spreading while deep talk next week is not. Either you know you can spill your guts out to this friend, or you know it’s a shared intimacy not to be spread far and wide.
• Hospitality doesn’t always mean inside. Walking with someone, especially, is a truly hospitable act, especially when you walk extra distance to maintain the conversation or offer to help physically. Being forced to slow a youngster’s pace to match the elderly companion is a physical reminder that speed is not always necessary, you see more when you stop more and that aging comes to us all, and we should respect that.

• Impromptu hospitality is great. The opportunity to listen, to offer compassion and share the mental burden even if only temporarily can happen anywhere at any time. We talked about the five minutes spent talking to someone on the street as a moment you could never plan for, or record, but as one that often happened just on the day when you needed to meet someone with a ready smile who could make you feel everything is normal, even if not nice, and let you walk on happier in yourself.
• Having an unburdened life and home means you’re ready for hospitality when it arises. Keep life simple and it’s easier to change a plan, to offer a space at the table, to drop into someone else’s day and share that cuppa, the lunchtime sandwich in the park, or meet at the lake on a wet Saturday because *someone* needs to get out, or risk losing it.
• Embrace the inner facet of hospitality. It’s no use offering a space, time or resources if you don’t go on to meaningfully be content doing so. Hygge won’t happen in a place where one or other participant is moaning or begrudging the time spent, the cost or the company. Be glad, whether you’re the recipient or the donor. Embrace an attitude of gratitude and thank God (Goddess or whoever/whatever you thank) that you are free to offer/accept, that you have the resources to do either and that the opportunity to do so has arisen. Logan Murphy writes “We can approach hospitality with joy, knowing that it will be as much a blessing to offer hospitality as to receive it.”

Our life circumstances should never stop us from offering hospitality. Your home is an absolute mess? Meet at a park. Your elderly parents no longer get out? Bring the hospitality to them. You know no one? Take a moment to say hello to colleagues, church family you’ve never spoken to, gym buddies. Say hello everyday for a week and then ask them would they like a coffee. They say no? Ask again next week, and the week after and the week after.

Carry a chocolate bar with you and give it out to someone you meet. Talk to the dog owners (they’re usually lovely people: judge them by their dogs, if you have to) or the pram pushers. Speak to the pensioner in the queue at the Post Office.

We all know how good hospitality (the making-people-feel-welcome kind) is for society: it builds bonds, creates cohesion and closes gaps between very different people. It can’t be imposed on us: it has to be embodied from within. Be the host you’d like to meet on a cold, dark, winter’s day when you’re too early for school pick up and desperate for the loo.

How to Hygge the British Way is my gift to the world. I don’t get paid for writing it, I’m not in it for the kudos, financial rewards, to become an influencer, work with brands or otherwise make any money from the blog. That’s why there are no ads, and any products I mention and recommend have either been gifted to me or bought by me with my everyday wages or donations from supporters. Every book I review has been bought and read by me, unless stated otherwise.

I do get a couple of pennies each time someone buys from the Amazon links on my page, as an Amazon Affiliate, but otherwise if you’d like to support me, I like to give something back in return. That’s why I write books. It always feels good if you get a book back in return for some money. You can find a full list of my books at my Author’s Page on Amazon, but especially recommended for this time of year are:

Cosy Happy Hygge: Setting up a rhythm to life and rituals to enjoy it to make for a more balanced life that handles waves and storms better. Lent is a season of rituals and resets. The book has small and easy ways to make your life flow with grace and happiness, which lead to more hygge.

Happier: Probably my most personal book, it’s the story of how I used hygge and the little things in life to help boost my happiness. I still go back and reread to remind myself what I need to do to be a happy human. And it’s always the little things.

Is it too early to think ahead? My Christmas books are always available: Have Yourself a Happy Hygge Christmas is a good place to start, on how to make the season cosier, happier. Celebrating a Contagious Christmas was written during covid year, but has useful advice on celebrating when times are hard anyway and Enjoying a Self-Care Christmas is a short e-book on keeping Christmas simpler, easier and better for you, your waistline and your budget. It even includes 25+ suggestions for self-care activities over Christmas, as simple as sipping tea, keeping a list journal or lighting a candle. Bigger is not always better for Christmas.

I’m currently working on two book projects: I have a hankering to rewrite 50 Ways to Hygge the British Way, so it’s not available at the moment, but even dearer to my heart and my next stated aim is to finish and publish my next book, Simple Plus Cosy = Hygge. It will be about homemaking and how the home we create shapes the hygge we have. Hopefully it will be finished by the end of summer/autumn/winter 2024 or 2025.

If you’d like to support me, but don’t want to buy a book, I have a Paypal.Me account as Hygge Jem. Every little helps, so even a few pence goes towards the books, goods and courses I use and recommend on the site. I’m grateful for every little bit that brings me closer to my dream of full-time writing, and I know I couldn’t still be writing if it weren’t for the support of many readers and friends out there. Thank you all for every little bit of support, emotional, physical and financial, you give me.

If you’ve enjoyed this article, don’t forget to share it or save it so others can enjoy reading, thinking about and living hygge as well.

The photo between post and promotions is by Debby Hudson on Unsplash. Red tulips, ready to add a dash of Spring to my life. What better?