Winter Wants To Kill You

Joe MacLeod
The Awl
Published in
4 min readFeb 4, 2013

I hope everybody had a good Super Bowl, and even if you didn’t Observe it, you mighta been able to have a less-annoying grocery experience, shopping outing, or possibly enjoy a less-crowded movie theater or exercise gym because of the whole XLVII thing, so it was Good Times for America, especially since that whole deal with the lights going out in the Mercedes-Benz stadium in New Orleans wasn’t Terrorism or whatever, you know? Just for a minute, I thought maybe it was.

For your too-much-information, I enjoyed Super Sunday, and I support legislation to make the day after Super Bowl, aka “Super Monday” the National Hangover Holiday of America, especially since you can have an alco-hangover, but also a food-hangover is possible.

I’m disappointed, however, that one of my fave-rave holidays, Groundhog Day, got lost in the news cycle. Groundhog Day! This is an overlooked holiday, mostly because it is not a Holiday, but c’mon, this is the day when we acknowledge it’s a lock that there’s only six more weeks of Winter! Everybody who lives where there is Winter understands why you need to know every year that Winter will not be forever.

Most of us who have Winter won’t live in the Nordic North or wherever it is that people actually enjoy Winter, with giant warm coats and mukluks and cross-country skiing and outdoors skating on ice and ice-hockey and fishing and downhill skiing and tobogganing and luging; instead, basically Winter is a big giant fucking pain in the ass, with coldness and darkness and cold darkness, and frozen things outside that can kill you and sometimes the pipes in your house freeze up and you have to buy oil or natural gas or electricity to heat where you live just so you don’t die from sitting in your house, and then you have to put on all these extra clothes and footgear and headgear and handgear and neckgear just to fucking go outside, even for a few minutes, not that you want to go outside when it’s goddamn Winter anyway, where there are great sheets of ice and frozen precipitation, plus, assuming it’s not a flat sheet of dark grey sky, there’s only like three hours of daylight, but that’s really when you do need to go outside, otherwise you get the Seasonally Activated Depression Suicide Syndrome Disease and you will want to kill yourself or just stay in bed where it’s warm, and even if you don’t have the Seasonal No-Light Depression you want to stay in the bed anyway because it’s cold outside of the bed, and then just to get from the bed to the bathroom (where it is also cold) requires putting on clothes or stuff for your feet because it’s cold, cold, cold, everywhere, and when you finally get to the bathroom, it’s totally cold in there, and if you have to sit on the can, that’s cold, where your flesh touches it, and then you need to take a shower to warm up and then as soon as the nice hot shower stops you’re cold again, and then your skin starts to dry up, and you have to put on lotion all the time otherwise you get the “Winter skin,” where your skin gets all dry and itchy and tight and if you move too quick in any direction it’ll crack open, your skin, so you need the lotion, otherwise your skin will be split into huge fissures, and so you really have to be careful to put lotion on your legs and your sides and your back and sometimes into your nose because that gets dried out as well, and if you are by yourself, you can get to most of your back, but there will be one spot up high in between your shoulder blades that you can’t get to, and that part will dry out and kill you.

So c’mon, Spring! Right? There is a reason to fight Winter and stay alive! Groundhog Day teaches us there will be Spring!

According to the observed ceremony, the Groundhog is supposed to say (through an Approved Ritualistic Marmot-Psychic interpreter) whether or not there’s gonna be an early Spring or a late Winter or whatever, but look, the season of Winter ends on March 21, and that’s a little over six weeks from now! We’re headed for daylight! Springtime is guaranteed, and expressing obeisance to a noble land beaver such as Punxsutawney Phil of Pennsylvania, America, is a very Holiday thing to do, and the Groundhog itself, along with any information divined from it, is symbolic and mystical, like all good holidays. Plus, the Groundhog is considered an immortal being, like all of your better worship-animals. Groundhog!

Plus, there’s no presents, and you are not required to eat a Groundhog.

Previously: The Super Bowl Is The Exclamation Point Of America


Mr. Wrong can converse with you via many medias.

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Joe MacLeod
The Awl

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