It was a hot and muggy Halloween here in South Carolina (with tornado warnings mid-trick-or-treating!), but my complaints about the season’s distinct lack of autumnality must have worked:  we’ve had a crisp, cold week.  Indeed, in true South Carolina fashion, we’ve largely skipped autumn and have headed directly to winter (of course, don’t be surprised if it’s 80 degrees on Thanksgiving Day).

I’m getting excited for Thanksgiving.  It’s been busy at work lately, and the natives are restless.  Teachers know when students need a break—there’s a weirdness to the atmosphere, and you can almost feel the kids clawing at the walls.  As a Leftie British colleague of mine once quipped, “You Americans think it’s a good idea to have eighteen weeks of school without a break.”  Usually I’m not one for foreign interlopers critiquing our awesome country, but even a progressive Briton is right now and then.

Mainly, though, I’m excited for some downtime with the family, with lots of filling food and cold, crisp days.  Sweater weather, as the vapid co-eds call it, has arrived, and I welcome it happily.  Like the vapid co-eds, I like all the pumpkin spice stuff, too.

So does controversial dissident blogger Z Man, who wrote a wonderful little piece about “Autumn Joy” a few weeks back.  Z Man’s clear-eyed, if contentious, view of our current civilizational collapse is frequently heavy—it’s a real drag contemplating our society’s cultural implosion—so it was refreshing to read something marginally more positive from him.

Fall is, of course, the best season.  For Southerners, it’s a reprieve from eight months of brutal heat and humidity, and all the bugs die.  While our unfortunate friends to the North experience freezing temperatures by late October (not to mention they live in God-forsaken Blue States, dominated by shrieking harpies), we at least get a taste of autumnal glory.  We also have football.

Z Man’s post echoes many of my own feelings about fall.  The cold air sharpens the mind, and invigorates thinking.  In typical Z Man fashion, his joy of the season is tinged with a certain Schadenfreude:  he enjoys watching people who hate the cold squirm, as he considers the “endless summer” types to be unserious sorts.  That might be a stretch, but I enjoy those kinds of sweeping generalizations, and there’s a ring of Truth to it:  if you want to live in endless summer, in a world without seasons, you’re trying to escape reality.

The autumn drives home that Nature is moving, whether we like it or not, and we’re susceptible to its whims.  It’s a reminder, too, of the seasons of life, and that we’re all part of a grand, endless cycle—something Solomon lamented in Ecclesiastes.  It puts some of our present problems in perspective—in a cosmic sense, they’re not that important.  God is in control of this merry-go-round.

Z Man also writes about the Danish concept of “hygge,” the cozy season, or a state of convivial coziness.  The cold closes in around us, so we bundle up in our warm homes, enjoying hot cocoa or coffee or tea, spending time together and enjoying the quietude of long nights.  One of my favorite aspects of fall and winter is that sensation of coming in from the cold into a warm house, and the feeling of contentment and security of being in from the elements.  It’s the same reason I love rainy days.

That desire for cozy togetherness explains the unfortunate concept of “cuffing season.”  Back in the dark days of 2018 through very early 2019, when I found myself in an astonishingly different online dating environment than what existed in 2016-2017 (a topic for another blog post, perhaps), I came across this whorish concept on the various meat-market dating apps available now.  Apparently, a lot of independent women who don’t need no man still get cold, and want to date men just from November through February to get the simulacrum of a relationship.  That’s just one of a myriad examples of how bad dating has gotten.

But I digress.  Here are Z Man’s concluding thoughts from his post, quoted at length:

I think the thing I like most about this time of year is the shorter days or that the days are growing shorter. I am at my most productive in the fall and winter, as the ever shorter days reminds me that I have only so much time. When the sun is up until a few hours before bed time, it feels like time comes to a crawl. When you wake in the dark and come home in the dark, you have no illusions about time. Every rustle of the leaves is like a giant clock striking the hour. Best get at it.

…

In Denmark, they call this the cozy season or the start of the cozy season. They have a word for it, “hygge” which roughly means “a quality of coziness and comfortable conviviality that engenders a feeling of contentment or well-being.” They take all their fun indoors, where they will turn the lights down, sit by the fire and have conversation with friends and family. In Lagos [Baltimore, Maryland], we include the sound of sirens and gunfire, but the concept is the same. I’m looking forward to the hygge.

I wholeheartedly agree.  Let’s get to work—and get to the hygge!