Winter

When people hear that I spend time in Iceland, they ask the same question: "Do you go for the midnight sun?" We do spend five weeks there in July, when my wife's family congregates and the weather cooperates.

Winter is when I understand Iceland.

The honest season

The midnight sun is Instagram. It's genuinely magical, sure, but it's also a bit exhausting. Your body forgets it's supposed to sleep. Everything feels performative: you are supposed to be outside doing Icelandic things because, hell, it's light at midnight. The pressure to optimise daylight hours is its own kind of tyranny.

Winter feels more honest.

We spent Christmas there a few years back, and I finally got it. The darkness creates this wonderful cocoon. The sun sits just above the horizon at noon and vanishes again by 3 PM. You stop pretending you're going to hike the glacier. Instead you go to a coffee shop at 2 PM and the entire country is there with you, unrushed, doing the exact same thing. There's something deeply civilized about it, like everyone agreed that winter is for being inside with hot coffee and good people.

The sky turns green

Then there are the lights.

The Northern Lights don't care about your schedule. They show up on their own terms, usually when you've given up waiting. We were driving back from dinner, maybe 11 PM, pitch black, the kind of dark you don't get in Switzerland, and suddenly the sky is green. Actually green. Actual, moving, luminescent green filled half the sky, nothing like a photo or time-lapse. My wife, who's Icelandic and has seen them a hundred times, still pulled over.

That's when I understood why Icelanders care less about the midnight sun. They've got something better in winter.

Cold, but manageable

The temperature was the other surprise: it is not that cold. This confused me the first time. Winter in Iceland hovers around freezing, maybe -2 to +2 Celsius. The jet stream comes north, bringing moisture and mild air. Meanwhile it's bitter and dry in Switzerland. In Reykjavik you wear a good jacket and you're fine. The wind is real, but the cold is manageable. You go outside. Life continues. Icelanders don't fetishize winter or pretend it's some trial to endure. It's just winter.

What makes it feel extreme is the dark. The contrast. From November through January, you're looking at 4–5 hours of actual daylight. The rest is twilight, storm, or black. It strips away the illusion that you have unlimited time. In summer, light is infinite. In winter, every hour counts.

The darkness makes you selective about what matters. You read more, you talk more, you notice things. The storms belong to the experience. Darkness frames the hours that remain and makes everything else more visible.

Next winter, we are going back. I would never turn down the lights, but they are not the reason. I want the coffee shops full of people doing nothing urgent, the honest dark and the permission to stop optimising every hour.