My First Finnish Winter

People warned me about the Finnish winter. Every single person. My mum sent me articles. My colleagues in Manchester made jokes about polar bears. A Finnish coworker, with that perfectly dry humour they all seem to have, simply said: “You will see.”

I nodded along and thought I understood. I’d been to Scotland in January. I’d survived a camping trip in the Lake District in November. I knew cold. I knew dark.

I knew absolutely nothing.

The Darkness Comes Slowly, Then All at Once

The thing about the Finnish winter darkness is that it doesn’t arrive overnight. It creeps in. In September, you notice the evenings getting shorter, but it feels normal — autumn, right? October gets gloomier, and you think, “Well, this is a bit much.” Then November hits and suddenly the sun rises at half nine and sets at half three and you’re sitting at your desk in artificial light wondering what happened to the sky.

By December, Helsinki gets roughly six hours of daylight, and I use the word “daylight” loosely. It’s more like the sky goes from black to dark grey to slightly lighter grey and then back to black again. According to the Finnish Meteorological Institute, southern Finland gets its least daylight around the winter solstice in late December — and up north in Lapland, the sun doesn’t rise at all for weeks.

The first time I left work at 4 PM and it was pitch dark, I felt genuinely disoriented. My body was convinced it was 9 PM. Every instinct said “go to bed.” Instead, I was supposed to go to the supermarket and then somehow have an evening.

I’d read about seasonal affective disorder, of course. But reading about it and feeling the weight of the darkness pressing down on you at 2 PM on a Tuesday are two very different things. By mid-November, I understood why every Finnish home seems to have approximately four hundred candles.

Learning to Dress (The Hard Way)

My first proper cold snap was minus fifteen. I walked to the bus stop in my good English winter coat, a wool scarf, and what I considered to be robust gloves. Within three minutes, my face hurt. Within five, I couldn’t feel my fingers. I lasted about seven minutes before I turned around, went home, and reconsidered every clothing choice I’d ever made.

The Finns have a saying — there’s no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing. This is annoyingly true. Once I invested in proper gear — a serious winter coat, thermal layers, wool socks, a hat that actually covers your ears, and lined boots — minus fifteen became… manageable. Not pleasant, mind you. But manageable.

The learning curve was steep. I discovered that cotton is basically useless in real cold (it holds moisture and then you freeze). I learned that your core stays warm but your extremities betray you first. I learned that the ten seconds between your front door and your car can be genuinely brutal if you’re not prepared.

My Finnish colleagues, of course, found all of this hilarious. One of them showed up to work in minus twenty wearing a light jacket and no hat, and I’m still not convinced he’s fully human.

The First Snow

And then, sometime in late November, it snowed properly for the first time. Not the grey slush I was used to from Manchester. Real snow. The kind that falls in fat, silent flakes and covers everything in white and makes the whole world go quiet.

I woke up one morning, pulled open the curtains, and just stood there. The street below was completely white. The trees were white. The cars were white. Everything was blanketed and muffled and impossibly beautiful. The darkness that had been oppressive for weeks suddenly had a counterpoint — the snow reflected every scrap of light and the city glowed in a way I’d never seen before.

I went for a walk that morning before work. Just me and the snow and the crunch of my boots and the absolute silence. A few other early walkers passed me, bundled up, breath visible, and we exchanged those small Finnish nods that I’d come to understand as the equivalent of a warm embrace from anyone else.

That walk changed my relationship with winter entirely.

How Finns Handle It

The thing that impressed me most was how Finns don’t fight winter. They don’t treat it as something to endure or complain about. They lean into it. They go cross-country skiing after work. They drill holes in frozen lakes and swim in them (this still baffles me, but I respect it). They light candles, drink hot chocolate, and make their homes absurdly cosy.

There’s a concept here — not quite hygge, the Finns would bristle at the Danish comparison — but something similar. A warmth that comes from accepting that it’s cold and dark outside and choosing to make the inside warm and bright. Every café in Helsinki in December is a little pocket of golden light and good coffee and quiet contentment.

I also noticed that Finns don’t really moan about winter. Back in England, weather complaints are basically a national sport. Here, winter is just winter. It comes, it’s cold, you deal with it. There’s something refreshing about that matter-of-factness.

Coming to Terms

I won’t pretend it was easy. There were days in January when I hadn’t seen the sun in what felt like weeks and I genuinely questioned my life choices. I bought a SAD lamp and it helped. I forced myself outside every day, even when every fibre of my being wanted to stay under the duvet.

But somewhere around February, when the days started getting noticeably longer and the light came back in these gorgeous pink and orange sunrises over the frozen sea, I realised something. I’d survived. More than that — I’d found things to love about winter that I never would have discovered in Manchester.

The silence of a snowy forest. The way the cold makes you feel intensely alive. The particular pleasure of stepping into a warm room after being outside in minus twenty. The first time I tried a sauna followed by rolling in the snow and felt my entire body vibrate with something I can only describe as furious joy.

What I’d Tell a First-Timer

Invest in good clothing. Seriously. Don’t be a hero. Buy the thermal underwear. Buy the proper boots. Your English winter coat is a summer jacket here.

Get a vitamin D supplement and a SAD lamp. No shame in it. The Finns use them too.

Go outside every day, even when you don’t want to. Especially when you don’t want to. The winter is beautiful if you actually look at it.

And give it time. The first winter is the hardest because everything is new and your body hasn’t adjusted. By the second winter, you know what’s coming. By the third, you almost look forward to it.

Almost.