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What Makes Winter “Winter”?

IN PLACES WHERE the first snow of the season falls as early as October, preparations for winter begin in August. On the coasts of Norway and Sweden, boats are pulled ashore and stored safely so they’re not damaged by winter storms. Wooden planks are oiled, the last potatoes are dug up and tucked away in a dry place, and flower beds are mulched with seaweed. Windowpanes in seasonal homes are covered with paper to prevent birds from accidentally flying into them. People leave their summer houses but don’t lock them, so that those seeking shelter can find a place to stay in case of emergency and fortify themselves with the frugal supplies. A thoughtful gesture.

Some people, as much as they might have looked forward to cold and clear winter air during the heat of summer, become melancholy when the season arrives. Other people hope to find time to rest. Still others studiously devote themselves to seasonal tasks. Is the heating in good working order? Are the window seals clean? Is the roof or the outside of the house in need of repair? Is the water in the garden drained and shut off? Are the pipes near the house well insulated so they won’t freeze, break, and flood interior spaces? Are the gutters clear of foliage, needles, and moss? Is there enough sand or salt to scatter on the driveway? Are winter tires required? A ladybug that would normally winter in a sheltered nook outside flies into the house, clearly hoping to shelter there for the cold season.

When the time comes, the air gets cooler, the light gets weaker, and the days get noticeably shorter. Winter is on its way—we can feel it in our bones—but it isn’t quite upon us yet. The sky is gray. Migratory birds have been gone for a while now. It rains, sometimes for days. It’s a time of transition, of in-between seasons. In London, Alfred Alvarez swims almost daily in the ponds of Hampstead Heath, even though he is well into his eighties. On November 8 it is fifty degrees Fahrenheit (10°C). He notes: “Today feels like the first day of winter—no colder than yesterday, but dark and windy and raining hard—the sort of day when you grit your teeth before you take off your clothes. But the temperature of the water hasn’t changed—it’s more refreshing and delicious than chilly—so maybe gritting your teeth is part of the pleasure.”

At first, the transition takes place in small, as-yet-imperceptible steps. There’s a delicate, cold prewinter drizzle. A bottle half-filled with water and forgotten in the garden shatters on a cold night. Leaves coated with delicate needles of hoarfrost glitter in the sunlight. A few nights later, the first snow falls, and myriad crystals of endless complexity reflect the glow of the streetlights, brightening the room. And, aside from the occasional cracking of trees as sap freezes, it’s much quieter. It’s said you sleep more deeply when there is snow on the ground. The Japanese language has an expression for the first snowfall of a new winter: hatsuyuki.

Only the most diehard still feel drawn to the outside, either out of necessity or to experience the particular pleasures of the crisp, cold air. People brave biting winds to check traplines, chop through ice to keep water and fishing holes open, or crawl into holes scraped in the snow to survive the night. They plummet down precipitous slopes on skis, glide over frozen lakes on skates, or trudge on snowshoes under the soft white light of a full moon. Children build snow forts and pelt each other with snowballs. Adults draw their chairs around a crackling fire, closing the curtains against the dark, hands cradling steaming mugs as they share stories that bring families and communities closer together. In the cold of winter.

The season people know as winter is laden with meanings and customs that are influenced by culture, latitude, and altitude. Every country outside the tropical zones is familiar with it, and yet in each climate zone it manifests itself somewhat differently: farther north—whether in Scandinavia, Siberia, Alaska, or Canada, and with all the peculiarities and particularities of geography and climate in those regions—winter is at its most extreme.

Daylight becomes a precious resource at higher latitudes. The shortest day of the year in Barrow, Alaska, the northernmost point in the state, lasts for just three hours and forty-two minutes, and on that day the sun doesn’t even rise above the Arctic Circle. Mountains exacerbate the effect of dwindling winter light. In Norway, villages in valleys surrounded by steep mountains are cast in shadow for almost six months of the year. In 2013, in the southern Norwegian town of Rjukan, people placed three large mirrors above the city to redirect sunlight into the valley and onto the faces of the people living there. This was a first for the city and was understandably celebrated as a historic event. Incidentally, the idea for using mirrors originally came up more than a hundred years ago, though before Rjukan, no town had attempted to put it into practice.

In the almost endless night of northern winters, snow brightens the landscape as it reflects the light of the moon and the stars, making the darkness more bearable. Where snow lingers for four to five months, trees sag under its weight. From a distance, snow-clad conifers look like huge, irregularly formed candles dripping with wax. Even farther north, the stunted growth of trees and shrubs levels the landscape, stripping it of its features.

The Arctic receives less than ten inches (25 centimeters) of precipitation a year, making it technically a desert, and the air there is surprisingly still and clear. Cold air absorbs very little moisture, which means that barely any snow falls in extremely low temperatures. If and when storms rage, however, the snow they bring remains on the ground for a long time due to the unremitting cold.

The Antarctic holds more than two-thirds of the Earth’s fresh water in its thick shields of ice, but it, too, experiences very low snowfall because of the extremely cold temperatures that dominate the region year-round. With so little change in the landscape, time appears to stand still. The cold has a lock on vast stretches of land that thaw only briefly during the summer. By drilling down more than ten thousand feet (3,000 meters), scientists have collected ice cores that are approximately 900,000 years old and contain data spanning more than eight ice ages.

In some places in the North, however, it’s not as cold as you might suppose: on Bjørnøya (Bear Island), which is situated between Norway’s North Cape and the Svalbard archipelago, the average temperature during the winter months is a mild fourteen degrees Fahrenheit (−10°C). In the northeast of Greenland, by contrast, the temperature is minus four Fahrenheit (−20°C). These are averages, of course; the coldest temperatures measured at a particular place are significantly lower. For Alaska, that number is minus eighty (−62.2°C), narrowly beaten out by Snag, Yukon, in Canada, at minus eighty-one (−62.8°C). Many northern communities depend on freezing temperatures so people can hunt by sled and snowmobile and supplies can come in by truck. Lack of snow, melting permafrost, and unpredictable ice cover on lakes actually isolate them even further. For people here, the real problem is not enough winter, rather than too much.

Although winter and snow are often thought of as being practically synonymous, winter is only indivisibly bound to snow in northern Europe, Russia, Alaska, and Canada, and in many mountainous regions. As you move south, the character of winter transforms dramatically. In certain regions of Central Europe today, snow fails to appear at all. In the Mediterranean, southern California, and Florida, summers on average are hotter and longer, which means winters are even shorter and milder than they once were. There’s a certain irony to plastic snowmen standing on balconies in Rome, “White Christmas” blaring from shopping-mall loudspeakers in the Sunshine State of Florida, or log-cabin holiday markets in London where most of the snow decorating the scene is artificial. Nevertheless, even in the Mediterranean, cold snaps can surprise inhabitants and leave their mark—not only in the French Maritime Alps, but also at much lower elevations in places such as Provence.

Brazil offers a pale imitation of what you can expect from winter in Europe or North America. The locals start preparing for the cold season in July. Residents of Rio de Janeiro, adapted to the warmth, perceive their average winter temperature of seventy-five degrees Fahrenheit (24°C) as cold, and when cooler wind from the Atlantic blows in, chasing off the rain and lowering humidity levels, the beaches empty and many people wrap up in sweaters, scarves, woolen caps, and parkas.

A few thousand miles farther south, cold once again has a grip on everything. Whether British-American captain and seal hunter John Davis and his men were actually the first people to navigate Antarctic waters, as well as to set foot on the Antarctic continent, on February 7, 1821, cannot be proven with absolute certainty; however, Davis did come upon a frozen desert the likes of which no one had ever seen. Because temperatures here remain well below freezing—they rise to between minus twenty-two and minus thirty-one degrees Fahrenheit (−30 to −35°C) in the summer—the snow of the preceding year is simply buried, sinking ever deeper into the ice sheets as it is compressed under the precipitation of the current year. There are places where the ice sheet is three miles (nearly 5 kilometers) thick; air bubbles in old ice preserve details about the atmosphere and climate of bygone eras. Despite the constant deep freeze, however, the ice here is not eternal. The relentless pressure eventually causes it to sink to the Antarctic floor, and from there it flows along the seabed to the coast and out into the ocean.

If fall and spring are regarded as times of transition, then summer and winter become the real seasons. In the Bible, the story of creation tells of day and night, heat and cold, summer and winter. In subtropical and tropical regions, where there is little variation in the length of the days and the intensity of the sun, it makes sense to talk about only two or at most three seasons. In polar latitudes, two seasons suffice: the long winter and a brief summer. Dividing the annual cycle into three or four distinct periods dates back to antiquity, when seasons were tied to the demands of agriculture.

The ancient Egyptians, for example, knew three seasons: the season of flooding (late summer and fall), the season of emergence (the emergence of seeds, that is, in winter and spring), and the season of harvest (summer). Our current perception of four seasons is a phenomenon of central and higher latitudes. Countries in this part of the world were culturally dominant, which meant they could disseminate their concept of four seasons far and wide. People divided up the year in the hopes of gaining dominion over it and to make it easier to plan for recurring tasks. We cannot be sure exactly when this categorization caught on, although we could look for a connection to the four elements and their qualities—warm, cold, wet, and dry—or see a parallel with the phases of human life—childhood, youth, adulthood, and old age. From there, it is certainly only a small step to personify the seasons, as we do with Old Man Winter, for example. But more on this later.

The Sámi, the original inhabitants of Scandinavia, think in terms of at least eight seasons. Breaking up the year like this makes more sense for the processes intertwined with their lives. Where they live, “real winter,” or Dálvvie, is preceded by “early winter,” which they call Tjakttjadálvvie. Early winter is a time of migration, not only for the retreating sun, but also for the reindeer, which gradually move to winter pastures. Real winter is the focal period. It is a time of nurturing. Quiet sets in. Everything is hidden under a thick layer of snow that is viewed as protecting the earth, and reindeer use their hooves to uncover the lichens that serve as their sustenance. Then the sun slowly fights its way back, announcing “late winter,” or Gijrradálvvie, and with it, the time of awakening. Snow still covers the land, but icicles everywhere begin to drip, and female reindeer move to the places where they will bear their calves in May or June.

In the Northern Hemisphere, winter begins when the sun reaches the deepest point of its annual trajectory on its southern turning radius. The winter solstice, as it is known, is the shortest day of the year and the sun appears—provided the sky is clear—particularly briefly. For meteorologists, December 1 is the first day of winter (for statistical purposes, they prefer to calculate the seasons in entire months). Nowadays, however, it feels like winter starts much earlier, its onset indicated by certain natural phenomena. In ancient times, there were a multitude of signs. For some, it was the disappearance of the bees; for others, the song of a particular bird. For the Coast Salish peoples of the Pacific Northwest, the peeping of frogs signaled the change from fall to winter and from winter to spring. Phenology is a widespread and recognized method of observing natural events. It connects the arrival of winter with such changes as the falling of larch needles in the Pacific Northwest and Central Europe. Winter is considered to be over in those areas when the catkins on hazelnut trees release their pollen and the skunk cabbage blooms.

As a result of climate change, the course of the seasons has shifted and become ever more unpredictable. Winters in general are getting shorter, while growing seasons are getting longer. A further rise in temperature is expected for the cold time of year, while at the same time, winters will be wetter. The early onset of spring creates problems: there’s no food for the proverbial early birds’ offspring, and no pollinating insects for early-blooming plants, because the bugs are still attuned to winter’s former cycles. On the one hand, farmers are happy that they can begin to sow spring barley, oats, and sugar beets early; on the other, they’re afraid that winter’s freezing temperatures might return and inflict significant damage on tender young plants.

If we want to understand how winter used to be, we rely on sources that retain its imprint: the width of tree rings, as well as the records and tools of people who lived through older times. All this input is woven into the complex network of meaning we call winter. What factors, moods, concepts, figures, and myths are most prominently associated with this season? What answers do history, science, and, not least of all, literature—which is uniquely able to illuminate the no-man’s-land between reality and imagination—have to offer?

And is winter really the worst time of year? Though it can certainly involve challenging experiences, icy cold, and unpleasantness, there are people who laugh it off, and for me personally, this season evokes both inspiring concepts and beautiful memories. Do you remember the first time you felt snow on your skin? When you thought you could smell it? When your ears hurt so badly that you couldn’t think of anything except the closest source of warmth? We long for winter. Winterlust—which, like “wanderlust,” is something to be enjoyed in nature—encompasses an unfolding of the human senses as we experience the particular enchantments of this time of year. And there must be a deeper logic running through the pattern of seasonal changes. As nature writer Wilhelm Lehmann once wrote, “[Winter] is the sunset of the year as nature settles down to sleep. But no matter how much this sleep resembles death, the resemblance is superficial, for all is merely resting so that it can rise revitalized once again.”

Anavik wearing wooden snow goggles, Bathurst Inlet, Canada, 1916