I live in the northern half of Sweden, where winters will indeed see little daylight.
Life up here continues despite of it though, thanks mostly to electric lighting and heating, as well as a generally well-developed indoor life. So the simple answer is, we do what we would also do in the other parts of the year, just usually with lots of artificial lighting.
That darkness doesn’t last nearly as long as people often seem to imagine though. We usually feel a bit like it’s “night most of the time” from around November till February, and then things return to a perceived “normal” brightness, followed by an absolute abundance of it in summer that can be almost too much.
And “darkness” doesn’t really describe it so well, either. It’s more of a twilight, so we get a lot of blue tones.
A whole design culture has been built around the recognised need to have it pretty and bright in winter, and so we turn the night into day, which I will show below.
Illuminated ski slopes in Åre, Sollefteå, and Östersund:
Urban streets in Östersund and Sundsvall; as you can see, having snow on the ground and in the trees takes away the gloom, and actually makes for a very colourful and bright experience, even in the twilight:
In my village, every corner is brightly lit by LED technology, as well:
Work environments and indoor spaces:
And even on the shortest day, the sun will still come up around 09:00, even if it goes down again at about 14:00 already. Until then, it will look like this:
On the whole, clearly a victory of electricity. We couldn’t do without it.
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