Winter is a great time for cozy, with the cold outside and the warm and friendly environment of the inside of a house. The word contains connotations of family, friends, and a refuge from a nasty exterior.
Cozy. What a wonderful word. Filled with security implications and the idea that a person or persons are content and warm and satisfied, plus they’re probably in a great looking scene. The couple snuggled in their bed is the classic definition and illustration of cozy, but on a broader sense the cabin in winter, the fireplace with chairs around it, the house in the rainstorm with people contentedly sipping tea and conversing is a wider view of cozy. There are cozy pictures, sometimes photos and sometimes drawn. It seems that cozy works better with cold weather, or at least with cold weather, cool weather conditions that involve rain and storms. Snowstorms can create a situation outside that begs for a person or group of people to find warm, safe, and comfortable conditions to combat that kind of weather.
A family eating together at Thanksgiving or Christmas can be a cozy scene, but I’m not sure if a family having a picnic on a spacious lawn and having a good time would be a cozy scene. The bed situation has come up in poems and all kinds of stories, and I once wrote about the winds that blow up to 40 mph which makes the walls vibrate and the studs crack a little. Knowing that just 3 feet away from my head there is weather that could kill quickly or at least make a person feel very uncomfortable.
When I’m thinking of cozy, I recall the house our family rented in Stoughton a few years ago when we attended the parade and festivities of the Norske Festival. Even though it would have been nice to go outside for a time in the evening in May, the temperatures were around freezing and on top of that it rained. Being together playing games, reading, munching on goodies, all these made a cozy scene and a wonderful time of family together.
When I camp in a tent in inclement weather, it’s cozy, especially when surrounded by warm blankets, a reading light, the feeling of being protected from the elements, whether cold or snow or rain. That is one time where it feels cozy and the protection is no more than a thin piece of cloth.
Movies and programs that are set in lodges can be cozy because each person or couple has a room but when they want to get together with everyone, they come out and sits by the fireplace. This often happens at a ski lodge where the people are resting from an exhausting day of skiing, knowing that tomorrow they’ll go out and do it again, or if the situation warrants, will stay in bed late in the morning and take the day off to rest the muscles. In that case it still makes the lodge or log cabin a place of refuge, a cozy environment.
The holiday season often conjures up cozy images, the ideal possible only in our thoughts.
When I think ‘cozy’ I think of laying in bed with five young girl cousins under the quilt Aunt Ginny made. Sometimes we’d have to whisper louder to be heard over the sound of rain on the tin roof. We were warm, snug, happy and deeply loved.