'The Holidays' which used to mean Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's Eve to me are behind us, and we are in that time that I think of as 'slogging through winter' until Good Friday or Memorial Day, when people with office jobs got an extra day off. The new holidays like Martin Luther King Jr Day were added in that dark time, and the President's Day was added as a sort of half holiday when government and bank employees get the day off.

So now we're slogging through winter not in day off terms, but in terms of it's actually winter and cold and sometimes bleak out. The sun shines in Colorado 245 days out of the year, 40 more days than the average so days without sunshine seem oppressive and a lot of us go back to bed with a good book until it brightens up outside.

It always reminds me of Thomas Hood's November poem.

No sun - no moon!
No morn - no noon -
No dawn - no dusk - no proper time of day.
No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease,
No comfortable feel in any member -
No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees,
No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds! -
November!