Winter starts on December 1, as far as I’m concerned. Some past years, that day has obliged us with snow cover, or least snow flurries, such as in 2006 and 2008 and 2010.

Not this year. I had to be out early in the morning to be somewhere, but it was merely dry and below freezing.

Or maybe winter started the night about a week before Thanksgiving when I was out ’round midnight and spotted Orion riding high in the sky, trailed by the loyal Canis Major.

After I got home yesterday, I had a lot to do, and so didn’t spent much more time out in the early winter temps, or even thinking about them. Early in the evening, I looked up the local temperature. About as cold as I thought: 28.

Then I had a moment of idle curiosity. The Internet was made for just such moments, so I looked up what I wanted to know: how cold it was at that moment in Anchorage, Alaska: 37.

Not as cold as I thought. The kind of thing TV weather presenters occasionally yak about, though usually in January: Look, it’s colder in Illinois than Alaska! But according to the respective 10-day forecasts, it will soon be single-digits in Anchorage, but not here.