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

[isis]

I love snow, and we're finally getting some this year after many years of drought-plagued winters. B and I have weekday passes to the local ski resort, and we go every Friday - or other days, if we get good fresh powder - and make up our work on the weekends. We make our way, run by run, over to the area on the back of the mountain which mixes moderate and hard runs and has excellent views across a valley to a range of mountains (which we have been on top of in various summers), and around 1pm we stop at the restaurant on the top and try to get a window table and drink a pint each of the local Backside Stout with our lunches. At the end of the day we drive home. B makes a fire in the wood stove, I make us mugs of tea, and we catch up on our email, read, warm up and relax.

If we don't go skiing, I still like to try to get outside every day. Either I walk to the grocery store with a backpack, or I go running - the city plows the rec path along the river which is only a few blocks from my house. Our typical winter day is cold but sunny, and it feels good to be outside. Then it feels doubly good to snuggle in front of the fire with tea or a glass of wine.

tl;dr I like being outside on cold winter days and then coming inside to where I am all snug and warm.