In the Bleak Midwinter

VIEWPOINT

By RALPH HARDIN

Evening Times Editor

There’s an old poem from the 1870s called, “In the Bleak Midwinter.” It was eventually set to music and while it’s about the birth of Christ and the events surrounding the first Noel, it is a morose and indeed “bleak” tune. It is, in fact, so dismal sounding that when I first heard it while with some friends, we called it “The Song That Killed Christmas.”

But man, isn’t that right where we seem to be right now? Sure, it has officially been winter for a few weeks now, but it was around 60 degrees on the actual first day of winter, so I guess we’re making up for it.

By the time you read this, we should only be a few hours away from what we’ve been promised is a major winter weather event, with several inches of snow. And the weather experts had better be right about this, because we sent my daughter

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back to Fayetteville for the start of the spring college semester two days early because we didn’t want her driving in snow and on icy roads.

But even before Winter Armageddon 2025 arrives, it has been bitterly cold lately, with temperatures hovering in the 20s and 30s and strong, biting northern winds snaking their way into any openings it can find in my clothes when I’ve gone outside.

This is just my least favorite time of the year. Maybe it’s because we’re coming out of the holiday season so it’s a bit of a come-down to get back to regular day-to-day stuff?

There’s really not a lot going on holiday-wise until you get to Easter, and even that’s a little ho-hum since all my egghunting kids grew up (yes, except for the glory of the resurrection of our Lord and Savior, but you know what I mean). But I really think it’s mostly the weather. Nothing is growing outside, you can’t really get out and do anything. The sun doesn’t shine as often and there’s just the general malaise of the whole season for the next three months or so until springtime finally arrives again, bringing warmer days, baseball season and tank-top-and-shorts weather with it.

But until then, I guess we’ll just muddle through as best we can in this “bleak midwinter” with the cold and gray. At least the snow will be pretty and cool if it arrives as predicted — as long as the lights stay on and the pipes don’t freeze…