Invitation: Pleasures of winter

[resonant]

I love so many things about Christmas, even though it's always kind of a rush and it involves more extrovert stuff than I'm really comfortable with. I love the music, and the food, and all the many opportunities to be creative (cooking, making crafty homemade presents, gift-wrapping, decorating, even choosing cards). People do daily December posts or write fannish Advent calendars. Yuletide.

And then it's over ... and there's just the season of long nights and sniffles and snow-shoveling, boots leaving puddles everywhere, having to put on a coat to take the garbage out, and months to get through before the farmer's market opens in June.

So I want to throw open an invitation here: Share your favorite pleasures of winter! Share recipes! Share stories of your family, born or found! Tell me what you look forward to doing every year. Give me excuses to make things out of paper or fabric, or to cook show-offy foods, or to put something else up when the tree comes down. Invent a reason why a person would post every day or try to time a story specifically to the slow months of winter. (If it's not winter where you are, gloat if you must.)

I'll start with one thing that I do look forward to every year: the citrus fruit that the high school music department sells in January. There is no orange better than a January band orange.

Comments

[resonant]

Christmas seems to assimilate winter-themed songs - "Let It Snow" and "My Favorite Things" and "Winter Wonderland" etc. (Now that I think of it, even "Jingle Bells" is a winter song and not a Christmas song!)

Do you have any music recommendations?

[wychwood]

That's true! I mostly exclude Christmas-associated songs (except for "River", because I really like that one and for some reason it isn't Christmassy in my head even though it explicitly talks about Christmas...), but my playlist includes:

California Dreamin' - The Mamas & The Papas
A Long December - Counting Crows
A Hazy Shade of Winter - Simon and Garfunkel
River - Joni Mitchell
Song for a Winter's Night - Gordon Lightfoot
Winter Flowers - Martha Tilston
Hockey - Jane Siberry
The Snows of New York - Chris de Burgh
Winter - Tori Amos
Valley Winter Song - Fountains of Wayne
Snow - Grey Eye Glances
White Winter Hymnal - Fleet Foxes
Love Like Winter - AFI
Heart of the City - The Arkells

So some positive and some negative, because winter is always a mixture of both! More suggestions always welcome...