I've Lived Through 35 Icelandic Winters. Here's What Actually Happens.

Last December, I was driving home from work at 3:45 in the afternoon and it was pitch black. Not twilight. Not dusk. Black. The kind of dark that makes your headlights feel like a suggestion. I pulled into my driveway, sat in the car for a minute with the engine running, and watched the snow blow sideways through the beams. Then I went inside, turned on every light in the house, and ate a piece of rúgbrauð with butter standing at the kitchen counter.

That's winter in Iceland. Not the version you see on Instagram with someone in a hot tub gazing at the northern lights with a glass of red wine. I mean, that happens too. But first: the dark.

The Dark Is Not a Metaphor

People ask me what winter in Iceland is like and I always start with the same thing. It's dark.

In December, you get about four hours of daylight. And I'm being generous with the word "daylight." It's more like a long, grey suggestion of light somewhere behind the clouds, starting around 11:30 and fading by 3:30. You drive to work in the dark. You drive home in the dark. If your office doesn't have a window, you might not see daylight at all on a weekday.

This does something to you.

I'm not being dramatic. Seasonal depression is so common here that we don't even really talk about it — it's just a thing that happens, like the wind. You get tired. You get slow. Your body wants to sleep fourteen hours a day. The vitamin D supplements come out in October and don't go away until April. Some people use SAD lamps. Some people just power through it with coffee and stubbornness, which is more or less the national strategy for everything.

Pro Tip: If you're visiting Iceland in December or January, bring vitamin D supplements and don't fight the darkness. Lean into it. Go to bed early. Wake up slow. You're not lazy — your body is responding to four hours of light exactly the way it should.

The thing nobody tells you is that the dark changes the way you experience everything else. Food tastes different when you eat dinner at 5 PM and it's been dark for two hours. Music sounds different. You notice the warmth of your house in a way you never do in summer. Every candle matters. Icelanders burn an absurd number of candles between October and March, and it's not for aesthetics — it's survival.

The Wind Will Try to Kill You (Affectionately)

Forget the cold. Everybody worries about the cold. The cold is manageable. It's the wind.

Icelandic winter wind is a living thing. It comes off the North Atlantic with genuine malice. It doesn't blow — it shoves. It finds the gap between your scarf and your collar. It turns rain into needles. It makes -5°C feel like -20°C, which is a fun trick that never stops being surprising no matter how many winters you've been through.

The wind will try to rip the car door off your hand. Let it. Then close it properly.

I have seen tourists open their car doors in Vík and watch them bend backwards on the hinges. I have seen a grown man chasing a hat across a parking lot in Þingvellir in January. I have been that man. More than once.

Driving in winter here is its own discipline. You learn to check road.is obsessively. You learn what "impassable" means and you respect it. You learn that the highland roads are closed for very good reasons and that your rental car, no matter what the brochure said, is not equipped for what's up there. You learn to pack blankets in the car, extra food, a charged phone. Not because you're paranoid — because everyone does it.

Pro Tip: Check road.is and [vedur.is](https://vedur.is) every morning before you go anywhere. Conditions change fast. A clear morning can turn into a whiteout in thirty minutes. If a road is marked yellow or red, don't test it. It's not being overcautious — it's being Icelandic.

And yet. There's a moment — it happens at least once every winter — when the wind suddenly stops. Just drops. And you're standing outside in the stillness and you can hear everything. The snow settling. A bird somewhere. Your own breathing. It lasts maybe two minutes. Then the wind comes back. But those two minutes are worth the other six months.

Jólabókaflóð and the Art of Staying Inside

There's a word you'll hear if you visit Iceland around Christmas: jólabókaflóð. It means "Christmas book flood." Every year, publishers release a tidal wave of new books in the weeks before Christmas, and on Christmas Eve, the tradition is to exchange books, then spend the rest of the night reading in bed with chocolate.

That's it. That's the tradition. Get a book. Get chocolate. Go to bed and read.

I love this country.

Jólabókaflóð is the most Icelandic thing I can think of, because it perfectly captures what winter here is really about: finding elaborate, beautiful excuses to stay inside where it's warm. We are world champions at this. The whole culture bends around it. We bake. We knit. We watch more television per capita than almost anyone. We invite people over for coffee that turns into dinner that turns into someone falling asleep on your couch at midnight.

The food shifts too. Summer is lamb on the grill and skyr with berries. Winter is plokkfiskur and meat soup and hangikjöt — smoked lamb that fills the whole house with a smell that, for me, is the smell of December. My mother makes pylsusúpa in a pot big enough to swim in, and it sits on the stove for three days, and you just eat it whenever you're hungry.

Then there's þorrablót.

Every year in late January, we hold þorrablót — a midwinter feast where we eat things that would make most tourists quietly leave the room. Svið (singed sheep's head). Slátur (blood pudding). Hákarl (fermented shark that smells like a chemistry experiment gone wrong). Hrútspungar (I'll let you Google that one). We wash it all down with brennivín, which translates to "burning wine" and earns the name.

It sounds like a dare. It's actually a love letter to survival. Our ancestors ate these things because they had to, and we eat them now because it connects us to every winter that came before.

Pro Tip: If you're in Iceland in late January or February, find a þorrablót to attend. Many restaurants and community centres host public ones. You don't have to eat the shark. But try the hangikjöt and the flatbrauð with butter. And definitely drink the brennivín — it makes everything easier.

Northern Lights From the Kitchen Window

Here's what the brochures get right: the northern lights in winter are genuinely, no-exaggeration extraordinary.

But here's what they get wrong: you don't always need a tour bus and a two-hour drive into the countryside. Some of the best aurora I've ever seen was from my kitchen window in Mosfellsbær at 11 PM on a Tuesday while I was making tea. Green curtains rippling across the whole sky, bright enough to cast shadows in the garden. I stood there holding a mug of chamomile and watched for forty minutes. Nobody else was awake. Just me and the lights and the quiet.

That's the thing about Iceland in winter. The magic isn't always scheduled.

Of course, if you want to maximise your chances — and especially if you're only here for a few days — a guided northern lights tour is worth it. The guides know where the clear skies are, they can adjust on the fly, and they'll drive so you can just stare up through the windshield. But also: just look up. Every clear night between September and April, there's a chance. The aurora forecast at vedur.is is your friend.

Some of my favourite winter memories don't involve the lights at all, though. They involve the hot tubs.

Every town in Iceland has a public swimming pool with hot tubs. Every one. This is non-negotiable infrastructure, like roads and electricity. In winter, you sit in 40°C water while snow lands on your face and melts. Your hair freezes into weird shapes. You talk to the person next to you about nothing — the weather, the football, whether the new bakery on Laugavegur is any good. You get out, run through the cold to the changing room, and you feel like a different person.

A visit to one of Iceland's geothermal spas in the middle of winter is the single best thing you can do for yourself after a long day of sightseeing. The Blue Lagoon gets the press, but the small-town pools — Hofsós, Húsavík, the Westfjords — are where the real experience is. Fewer people. More sky. Cheaper, too.

Why We Don't Leave

People from other countries ask me this all the time. Why do you stay? Why don't you move somewhere warm? Somewhere with light?

It's a fair question. I have friends who've moved to Spain, Denmark, Canada. Some of them are happy. Some of them come back after two years because they miss something they can't name.

I think what they miss is the contrast.

When you've lived through an Icelandic winter — truly lived through it, not just visited for a week in December — spring hits differently. The first day in April when you notice it's still light at 8 PM, something breaks open in your chest. You feel it physically. Everyone feels it. The whole country gets a little giddy. People are outside. People are smiling. Strangers talk to each other. It's like the entire nation is recovering from the same illness at the same time.

You can't get that without the dark. The six months of wind and rain and 3:30 PM sunsets are the price of admission. And honestly? They're part of the thing itself. The winters make us who we are. Stubborn. Funny. Resourceful. Slightly unhinged about hot tubs.

The winter also gives you space. The tourists are fewer. The roads are quieter. The landscapes are empty and enormous and completely indifferent to your existence, which is either terrifying or freeing, depending on your personality. A winter sightseeing tour along the south coast in January, with the black beaches and the glaciers and the ice-choked rivers, is one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen. And I've seen it a hundred times.

So Should You Come in Winter?

Yes. But come prepared, and come honest.

Don't come expecting a fairy tale. Come expecting mud on your boots and wind in your teeth and darkness at 4 PM. Come expecting cancelled plans and sudden storms and a level of vitamin D deficiency that would alarm your doctor. Come expecting to spend more time indoors than you planned, drinking coffee and reading a book you bought at a gas station because the bookshop was closed.

And then, on one of those nights — maybe your second night, maybe your last — walk outside. Just for a minute. Stand in the cold and look up. If the sky is clear, you might see the northern lights. If it's not, you'll see clouds moving fast and low, lit from underneath by some town you can't see. You'll hear the wind, or the snow, or nothing at all.

Either way, you'll feel it. The big, quiet, electric strangeness of this island in the dark.

I've felt it thirty-five times now. It hasn't gotten old yet.

Come see it for yourself. I'll be the one in the hot tub.