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

[out_there]

I would gloat -- summer, sunshine, t-shirts and shorts, waking up without dreading the cold dash to the bathroom -- but yesterday was 41C here, and that is too hot for comfort.

[ursula]

I am looking forward to snowshoeing!

[rhi]

I don't know why, but orange marmalade tastes better on toast in winter.

[muccamukk]

I love the shapes of trees in winter. One of my greatest aesthetic pleasures is bare limbs against a monochrome sky. Without leaves, the shapes and colours of them stands out so much more clearly. For something really stunning, go to a formal garden in winter. The shape of it will take your breath away.

I love the little over-wintering passerines. They're so fluffy and fat, and scrub through all the bushes. I'm also quite fond of the fat little hawks and owls who eat the fat little passerines. There's quality birding this time of year.

[zulu]

I'm looking forward to taking L sledding! He is almost one: clearly, it is time. We have some nice gentle hills in the park near here. Now all I need to do is get a sled...

[likeaduck]

Every year I get a few Christmas cards and think sending some would be nice, but I'm not actually that I to Christmas and I never really have time before the end of December. But this year I attended a card making skillshare and bought a craft knife, and I think I'll just make cards when I want to, maybe send out some later-in-winter cards instead. There's no reason why we have to stop doing fun crafts and touching base with friends and family just because it's not Christmas anymore, right?

[nestra]

Yuletide. The fic exchange, not just the general season.

[resonant]

Eek, no. The temperature outside the body shouldn't be higher than the temperature inside the body. There should be a rule.

[resonant]

I've never tried it! There's a nature preserve that rents snowshoes, but on weekends we're always out of town. A big storm predicted next weekend, though - if it's not safe to drive down to Spouse Hamlet, maybe we'll get a chance to try!

[resonant]

What's your favorite brand? I think it's time for me to try marmalade again; last time I tried it was before I started loving bitter flavors.

[out_there]

The temperature outside the body shouldn't be higher than the temperature inside the body

That really should be a rule. It also shouldn't be colder than the inside of my fridge.

[china_shop]

It's only 19C here, and I have the a/c on. /wimp

[wychwood]

I don't much like orange marmalade, but lemon and lime marmalade are fabulous! And excellent winter foods.

[wychwood]

I love snow. As an adult I know I'm not supposed to, and I know it's a big pain for travel and work and people like my mum are stuck in the house until it melts, but I live in the UK and we don't get that much of it - it's still really exciting to me every time. And once Christmas is over, we can reasonably hope that there might be some snow! At some point! Although this winter has been so warm so far...

I also have a playlist of winter songs that I like - nothing Christmassy, but songs about snow and shinny on frozen ponds and all the leaves are brown and the sky is grey and being stuck indoors in the dark evenings... there's a pleasure in being seasonally appropriate, for me. Like, even when winter is not the most awesome, there's something about celebrating what it is that I find helpful.

[resonant]

This made me smile! There are lots of hawks where I am, and also bald eagles along the river. Also, beavers and muskrats have built mounds in shallow water - I wonder if the people here know of a way to watch the babies whenever they come out.

[resonant]

I saw a family of sledders on the drive south yesterday, on a hill so battered they'd obviously been at it for some time. Around here people will sled on pieces of cardboard or on the lids of those Rubbermaid storage bins.

[resonant]

Wow - I am totally going to do this. Maybe not handmaking the cards, but buy some pretty winter cards. I have such a long Christmas card list that often I'm reduced to just scrawling a few words, and since my dad died I haven't sent any cards at all.

[resonant]

Yay! I'm reading Yuletide today.

[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?

[celli]

Winter is tough for me, because the lack of light affects me mentally and the icy sidewalks are a physical danger - but my bed is on the same level as my window, and watching snowflakes drift through the streetlights is really quite beautiful. :)

[rhi]

I like Dundee's, myself!

[out_there]

19C is jeans and tshirt weather to me. Then again, I think your general weather is colder than ours so it makes sense that you'd be less acclimatised to the heat. (Mind you, cold under about 7C? I refuse to do it. I will botch every time a winter night drops below it.)

[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...

[resonant]

Snow is such a lovely nuisance, isn't it?

[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.