I've had a theory about winter for most of my adult life.  The way to enjoy winter is to, well, enjoy winter.   To find something you enjoy that requires winter — skiing, skating, snowshoeing, ice fishing, building snowmen, forts, igloos, something!  So winter isn't a season to get through, but a season to look forward to because now you can do this.   A particular challenge for me because I get cold quite easily, but a challenge I was prepared to take on.   

When I was young, skating was the local outdoor activity I looked forward to in the winter, on flooded tennis courts or the pond at the municipal golf course across town.  But as a parent of a young son in hockey-crazy Pittsburgh, skating, recreational or sport, took place almost exclusively at inside rinks.  This didn't require winter.  So my son and I embrace winter by shoveling, building snowmen, and engaging in the occasional snowball fight — not my favorite, but certainly one of his.    

Then we move to New England.  The first couple winters go by easily.   New England is beautiful in the snow, and in our family, we always have basketball games to get us out and about.   By the third winter, when my son is old enough to go on the weekly afternoon ski trips, if he has a parent chaperone, skiing becomes our winter activity, a sport I loved as a child.  I'm cold at times, but by the time a prolonged lodge visit will no longer thaw out my toes or fingers, I'm heading home in a heated car.  Five winters pass this way. 

Then, high school for my son.  No more snowmen. No more ski trips.  What would get me outside now?  Apparently the puppy we  adopt, a lab mix that needs lots of exercise.  The novelty of watching this adorable, young dog frolic in the snow sends more winters sailing by.     

Until this winter, when I hit the wall.  Our dog is older, wiser, and not so oblivious to single-digit days that freeze her paws, and excessive road salt that stings her pads.  We've just entered February, which means we've another two months of snow, and most of us here are already exceptionally weary from the snow, ice, cold, snow, cold, ice, snow, cold, snow.  The roads get narrower with every snow fall as the plowed mounds pile up, making it harder to pass along our byways, and enhancing the general feeling of winter's encroachment on the lives we're used to living.     

Thankfully, I have one more winter weapon in my arsenal.  Somewhere during the ski winters, I realized that while a blue-and-white bedroom might offer the serenity I always crave, this color scheme was too "cool" for New England winters.  Enter the yellow flannel comforter cover that is now on the bed for the winter months.  With the addition of this soft happy-face-colored comforter, reading in bed has become a treasured winter activity.  Robert Louis Stevenson may have headed to the land of counterpane when he was sick.  I head there when I want to be very well indeed.  There aren't happy faces actually on the comforter, but on many cold winter nights, there is one just above it.  Mine.