Issue 33: 10 Ways to Feel Cozier This Christmas

Melody WarnickBuy local, Love Where You Live experiment

A few years ago I read a book about the Danish concept of hygge, which roughly translates to coziness or charm or, I don’t know, specialness. Hard to pin down and harder to say—aim for a Viking horn–like “HYOO-guh”—the concept nevertheless stayed with me for putting a name to a kind of cozy contentment I’d experienced before and kept trying to recapture, most notably at Christmas.

Hygge is the predominant emotion of the holidays. Nursing a mug of hot cocoa, gazing at the Christmas tree lights, cuddling under blankets to watch Elf are all hard-core hygge. Also hygge: doing those things with other people. Along with the physical warmth (crackling fires! blankets!), hygge denotes an emotional warmth, part of what we feel when we’re with loved ones or a part of a community. More than any other time of year, the holidays invite us to seek connection with our community.

Try a suggestion or two from this holiday Love Where You Live list, and have yourself a hygge little Christmas.

1. Invite a neighbor to dinner.

2. Attend one of your town’s holiday events: the Christmas parade, the tree lighting, the gingerbread house competition.

3. Buy a Christmas gift from someone with whom you can have a conversation (like a local shop owner, or a maker at an art fair).

4. Invite a friend for a Christmas cookie-baking marathon—or the slightly lazier Christmas movie-watching marathon.

5. Go caroling to your neighbors.

6. Attend a holiday sing-along.

7. Host a Christmas Eve potluck, or a post-Christmas game night.

8. Take a walk with a friend, even if it’s cold.

9. Attend a Christmas church service.

10. Volunteer somewhere in your town that needs you.

Shameless self-promotion portion of the newsletter

The nicest thing to happen to me in a while was discovering that Anne from Modern Mrs. Darcy (you’re already a devoted reader of her website, right?) featured This Is Where You Belong on her One Great Book podcast. It’s the podcast where she devotes an entire episode to a single book. Previous episodes have featured classics like Peace Like a River or Never Let Me Go, so I’m incredibly flattered to be in such good company. Go have a listen.

7 items of interest

1. Does winter make you hate where you live? Aim for a tiny shift in mindset to enjoy your place because of the seasons, not in spite of them.

2. “You are leaving NYC for a reason, and if you keep comparing the two cities, you may never be ready.” On leaving New York for elsewhere. (P.S.—The Californians are leaving too.) P.P.S.—On the other hand, some people are just arriving.

3. An easy way to integrate joy into a city’s infrastructure: Paint all the streets!

4. The best books evoke a sense of place, like this memoir that took me straight to small-town Scotland. Here are two great projects that capitalize on the connection between literature and location.

5. Our community saves us. Actually, we save each other. Over and over. (I love the idea of the random Venmo!)

6. Completely free public transportation . . . makes people take public transportation. Surprise!

7. Preserving small towns by preserving their largest empty buildings.

xoxo, Melody

Issue 31: The #1 Thing I Learned in England

Melody WarnickLove Where You Live experiment, Place love

That time I went to England

I wanted England, where my family and I went in May on a long-obsessed-over trip, to overwhelm me with its Britishness.

And it did, it totally did. We’re not exactly world travelers over here. There was a thrilling amount of novelty in BBC-style accents and a pocket full of foreign coins. Each strange new thing filled me with a giddy joy. Picture me exulting in the Tesco supermarket over little plastic cups of trifle and cookies called “Jammie Dodgers.” Oh, Brits, how I love you.

Then, almost subconsciously, the four of us started to establish familiar rhythms in the midst of crazy London. Learning the ropes, as it were. There were still new sites to goggle at, but only after we’d swiped our Oyster cards on the double-decker bus like old pros. Only after we’d successfully navigated from our rental flat to the bus stop like we actually knew where we were in physical space.

It was a weird reminder that in a new place, mastery and familiarity create a sense of home quicker than discovery does. Our minds crave the temporary upending of the status quo (something I explain in my TEDx talk). But we also want a sense of control. Sometimes all that requires is shopping the same Tesco four days in a row and buying the same cups of trifle every time.

Shameless self-promotion portion of the newsletter

I wrote a story for Woman’s Day about small-town heroes like Dustie Gregson, whose restaurant in Asheboro, North Carolina, killed me with croissants. I was interviewed by the very kind Andrew Phillips for LinkedIn. This is Where You Belong was discussed on the Illiterate podcast. Want me to be on your podcast/website/stage? Hit me up.

7 items of interest

1. Good news: Small towns are cheap enough that you can do what you want there. (P.S.—My friend Mickey Howley, who’s quoted in this story, sent me this glorious cookbook straight from Water Valley, Mississippi. I still need to visit.
2. “Same Hill, Different Day”—such a wistful photography project about places changing over time.
3. Millennials aren’t actually staying in superstar cities anymore.
4. “Sometimes when I get off the train I feel like a salmon leaping up the last waterfall, knowing innately I’ve arrived.” On how the geography of childhood stays with you.
5. Funny, these tips on helping kids thrive living in a city (dine at every walkable restaurant, start a little free library) happen to double as stellar Love Where You Live experiments.
6. “The story of who leaves a place is just as important as the story of who stays.” Could you move back to your hometown? Would you want to anyway?
7. A solution for when geography separates you from old friends.

xoxo, Melody

P.S.—If you subscribed to my newsletter, you’d be getting links to, like, xylophones made out of Hot Wheels here. So subscribe!

Issue 30: In Praise of the Standing Date

Melody WarnickBlacksburg, Community, Love Where You Live experiment

For the past few months, the women at my church have been joining small interest groups—you know, like Meetups, but slightly more old-fashioned. Book club is an old standby, but now there’s a knitting group, a play group, a quilting group, a family history group, and so on. I was put in charge of the lunch group, because eating at restaurants is one of my core competencies. All I do is set a date and choose a place. As leadership roles go, I’ve had more challenging ones.

Who comes? Sometimes thirteen of us and we have to push together tables and apologize to other customers. Sometimes three of us, chatting quietly in a booth. I don’t always feel like showing up myself. (TBH, I rarely feel like doing anything at all.)

That’s where the standing appointment saves me from myself. Inevitably, once I’m eating my salad (just kidding, my burger) and discussing careers and kids, I’m happy I came. I just regularly forget to remember how happy I’ll be in the future.

While scheduling a hangout far in advance laughs in the face of spontaneity, I’m not sure much spontaneity exists in the modern world anyway, or that it matters. What we really need are ironclad methods to strengthen human relationships despite our laziness, busyness, and disraction, so that we keep building community even when we don’t feel like it or think we don’t have time for it.

In a beautiful essay in Quartz, Jenny Anderson writes about how painstaking this process of building connections really is. “Community is about a series of small choices and everyday actions: how to spend a Saturday, what to do when a neighbor falls ill, how to make time when there is none. Knowing others and being known; investing in somewhere instead of trying to be everywhere. Communities are built, like Legos, one brick at a time. There’s no hack.”

Well, maybe there’s one hack. Calendar the relationships you want to keep.

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Shameless self-promotion portion of the newsletter: I was asked to be the inaugural guest on a new podcast called Wellness 3.0, hosted by Amy Baglan, the smart, chill founder of MeetMindful. They’re launching a new app called Fabriq to help you socialize IRL, so we talked about finding friends and Sunday night dinners and saying yes and all sorts of good stuff related to social wellness. Go have a listen!

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7 items of interest

  1. How one town destroyed by disaster is trying to create a more vibrant version of itself by outlawing sprawl.
  2. Do you have a favorite place on earth?
  3. Better uses for big box stores.
  4. Leslie Knope is my spirit animal so I am overjoyed that someone created a Knope award for best government places.
  5. “My girlfriend recently moved to Iowa from Manhattan. She cut her rent by two-thirds while almost tripling her square footage.” Why the Midwest wins at quality of life.
  6. There is a Best Places board game, and the character cards include Tastemaker, Small Business Owner, Retiree and Hometown Hero. Sounds about right.
  7. Miami doesn’t have a Chinatown. So it’s making one.

xoxo, Melody

P.S. All the best bonus links are in my newsletter. But you have to subscribe.

Issue 29: Spring Will Heal You

Melody WarnickBlacksburg, Love Where You Live experiment, Place love

Spring is awesome.

In early March I got a message from a reader in Calgary, Canada, who was like, “I’m really struggling to love my city right now.”

I said, “Girl, everybody hates their city in winter.”

It’s weird because some data from Robert Putnam suggests that levels of social capital are higher the farther north you go. The theory is that in the kinds of places that are periodically afflicted with polar vortexes, community members rely on each other more for emotional and physical support. (Witness the good news stories about teenagers shoveling out a neighbor who needs dialysis.)

These are Little House on the Prairie places where winter was historically wiled away with visits and shared meals. That heritage of taking care of others seemingly passes down through a community’s DNA, despite our world of central heating and remote-start vehicles.

Nevertheless, I find myself withdrawing in winter. Like the Pandapas Pond frogs that disappear into the muck come December, I burrow. All my place attachment behaviors recede. I never want to leave my house. (IT’S COLD.) So I see friends less, walk less, skip community events, and don’t volunteer. By March I’ve forgotten what it means to act like someone who loves their place.

Spring is my time to hit the reset button. Here in Blacksburg, we’ve had a string of 50-degree days, not exactly midsummer but we’ll take it. Last night, while my girls were off at church activities, I took a walk to the library. After five minutes of wrestling with wonky earbuds, I unplugged. I listened. To my own breathing, to a couple women urging on their reluctant dog, to robins and cardinals building nests in the trees. The full moon was rising. The light on the daffodils seemed pale and silvery. I thought, “How impossibly beautiful it is here.”

It’s easier to love your town in nice weather. It just is. So if you’ve hibernated this winter like I have, let’s remind ourselves how to like where we live. We’ll sit outside in the sunshine, work in the garden, and say hello to neighbors. If it’s not springy quite yet where you live, it’s coming, I promise.

I’m traveling a lot for work these days. I leave for Michigan in a couple hours. But I’ll be back on Friday, and I think that this weekend I’ll go to the farmers’ market. At long last.

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Shameless self-promotion portion of the newsletter: Moving soon? Know someone who is? Enroll in Relocation Recovery, the online course I helped create with tons of tricks, tips, and guidance for feeling settled after a move, all for $25!

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7 items of interest

1. 61 ways you don’t need permission to make your town better.
2. Has faith helped you make a moving decision? Or feel better about moving altogether? (My friend Rachel wrote this one.)
3. How to build communities designed for happiness and well-being.
4. Do you keep seeing the same stranger everywhere? It’s a thing. Read a few more adorable stories here.
5. More anchor institutions should buy local.
6. Reason to throw a party: “Every time people gather, they are being brought into the opportunity to help one another, to do what they couldn’t do or think up or heal alone.”
7. Why community development and decision-making is like making biscuits from scratch, not popping the Pillsbury can. (BTW, these girls are awesome.)

xoxo, Melody

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