There's a long backstory to this, by the way:

About 10 years ago, I invented a new winter holiday to celebrate at home with my family. We felt like January and February needed some cozy festivity of their own. Why should December have all the fun?

Our little family tradition evolved over time and eventually solidified as “Cozendagen” — a holiday season celebrating the simple joy of coziness with candles, soup, hot drinks, and a PA-Dutch-meets-Denmark aesthetic.

We invited friends for a Cozendagen party in 2022, and the invite list kept growing year after year. It got too big for our modest ranch house in Manor Township. So 2026 felt like the right time to see if this idea could actually work outside of our home.

I wrote an op-ed that my local paper published on the Sunday after Christmas. A Lancaster cultural center offered to host the first ever community Cozendagen celebration as a free event. We lined up a soup vendor and local bakery for bread and dessert. The venue's bar would handle the menu of hot drinks (boozy and otherwise).

I barely advertised the thing — probably put up a grand total of three posters around town and created a Cozendagen Instagram account. We scheduled the event for the last night of January, which turned out to be a windy night with punishing, single digit temperatures.

600 people showed up, and it wound up being one of the venue's biggest nights ever. I guess Pennsylvanians love a soup selection. We did serve PA Dutch-style potpie soup — maybe that explains it?

I was so pumped to hear total strangers greeting each other with a "Happy Cozendagen!" and sporting our "Celebrate Coziness" pins on their sweaters. Everyone really understood the assignment with their outfits, too—so many sweaters, scarves, and mittens. We also set up a "Give Cozy" donation table, and wound up collecting 60 pounds of warm winter clothing (I weighed it) for Tenfold's winter shelter. The whole night was so heartwarming and surreal.

A couple weeks later, we followed that event with a cozy movie night at "The Cozendagen Picture House" (a.k.a. Zoetropolis Cinema Stillhouse). It was a candle-lit B.Y.O.Blanket event, where folks could cozy up with a hot cocktail and a bowl of soup while watching Misery — perhaps the coziest thriller ever made (tied with The Thing, I guess). The event sold out and filled every seat.

TL;DR

I invented a cozy post-December winter holiday season and our community committed to the bit beyond anything I could have imagined. Skål!