I’m not a winter lover, but neither am I a winter hater. The way I look at it, if you’re going to live in Minnesota, you have to embrace winter to some extent — or else you’re just setting yourself up to be miserable for four or five months of the year.

But having lived through several decades of winters, I’m always happy when the season delays its full force. I was thrilled at our lovely autumn and delighted to see bare ground through the end of November. Because, let’s face it — we’re never going to skate through the entire season without getting our fair share of winter weather eventually.

As I write this, it’s about 35 degrees outside and even the thin snow cover we got recently is melting away. And so I’m declaring a moral victory over winter. The way I see it, even if winter comes hard and heavy, we’ve gotten about a six-week headstart on spring.

It would be astonishing if we didn’t have a pretty healthy snowfall between now and Christmas, less than two weeks away. I can’t ever remember a brown Christmas in Minnesota. But if it should happen, I’m all in favor of it.