"Cultural influences such as Christmas creep may have led to the winter season being perceived as beginning earlier in recent years"

I think I've always considered November to be winter, and at some point I picked up that Christmas is in the middle/even towards the end to break it up and give everyone something to look forward to, so I'm always a bit surprised seeing talk of winter in the future tense once I've put on the winter duvet/started wearing a coat all the time/turned on the central heating (not this year).

Equally anything in Feb seems firmly Spring.

But I'm not trying to force this on anyone!

There is more land in the northern hemisphere, more ocean in the Southern Hemisphere. Summers get hotter in the north, winters get colder. This is because land does not store/release nearly as much heat as ocean.

That's not just you. Every traditional calendar says the same thing.

As far as I can tell, the idea that winter starts on the solstice, when it's been winter for more than a month (unless you're in the tropics), is an invention of Hallmark or some other calendar manufacturer. It is based on nothing.

I tried reading Poor Richard's Almanac to see if it indicated the "beginning of [any season]", but if it does I didn't understand. (There is a column of "remarkable days", but it is often difficult to understand the entries in that column.)

Careful track is kept of the exact time of sunrise and sunset, and of what kind of weather to expect ("rain"; "snow"), but the seasons don't seem to be labeled explicitly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adoption_of_the_Gregorian_cale...

Historical average for the day is 56f 13c and the high is 74f so only a few degrees off

A - Things have gotten to the point where we can't talk about a damn season without personal interpretations of it;

B - This has seeped into Hacker News, a forum I thought was for more diligent folks.

And with climate change, traditional seasons aren't nearly as useful in discussion as they used to be.

In my area of my country, our autumn used to be the time of big stable highs giving rise to clear days and frosts overnight. Great time of year to go hiking, minimal chance of intense rainfall or snowfall in the high country.

Now the weather in autumn resembles that in spring - predominant north west winds that bring intense rainfall to the west, heavy snowfall on the tops, and hot dry days to the east.

I feel you're still getting hung up on definitions that are becoming more obsolete by the year.

Lastly, from my limited experience of Germany, the most miserable weather tends to come late October - November. It's not technically winter, but it's a frigging cold and miserable time of year.

It's definitely a bit more useful than arbitrary subjective interpretations of said terms based on hyperlocal weather patterns.

> I feel you're still getting hung up on definitions that are becoming more obsolete by the year.

I feel like you're not getting hung up enough on the definition of a definition. This might or might not be true, just how like if I feel that April is cold, it doesn't make it winter.

> I feel like you're not getting hung up enough on the definition of a definition. This might or might not be true, just how like if I feel that April is cold, it doesn't make it winter.

Meet interpersonal linguistic negotiation. Since in most Northern places most people feel cold roughly between November and March, no your one personal experience doesn't matter. Just like 'tall' is a perfectly useful word, even though it doesn't have a precise meaning in terms of number of millimetres.

Excuse me while I go enjoy this beautiful summer.

For what it's worth, if anything, this is certainly not true. Generally January and February are the coldest months in Germany, and if by miserable you mean dark, grey or snowy, it's also January and February.

I think the fact that what is most "miserable" to people varies so much is why trying to use the names for seasons to apply to whichever weather you dislike the most is confusing. I prefer the cold to the heat, and I'm much more miserable in hot humid days due to sweating than I am in the cold when I can bundle up and feel mostly fine, but it would be absurd for me to refer to June through September as "winter" in the northern hemisphere based on this.

For a farmer, it might mean when the animals need to be kept in a barn.

And for a commodities trader, it means when demand for gas is high.

Definitions are nearly always dependent on context, are nearly always fuzzy around the edges, and are nearly always subject to usefulness.

And then we aren't even discussing metaphors, hyperbole, pars pro toto, tota pro paribus, other kinds of metonymy, and more figures of speech.

Context made it perfectly clear what was meant here. It's a far more useful usage than the kindergarten level definition where winter starts at the winter solstice and not a day sooner.

This isn't new :)

Very large number of people in large number of countries will consider e. G. November "winter". It's cold, it's dark, it's snowing - the informal but practical definitions of "winter". It's not a sign of linguistic or social apocalypse. It's just people communicating.

If by personal you mean around the 5-600 million people that will totally get the context of winter = heating season especially when we are discussing gas for heating.

Congratulations, you've discovered a Truth.

Further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_game_(philosophy)

If there's a cold snap in mid May (Eisheilige), you still want your heating turned on, but generally it will fall outside of the heating season.

We can take every little coordinate point on the earth, its political structure, its energy-reliance structure, the will of its people, and plot what winter means to each and every one of us, but ultimately winter is winter; October is not winter, November is not winter, and a meter is not an inch.

When I read something like 'this Winter is warm with minimal gas burned so far', I refer back to the common interpretation of winter which is December -> March in the Northern Hemisphere, because otherwise I would have to start interpreting what the other three seasons mean also.

As I hope you are learning, in very many places in the northern hemisphere, perhaps including most of Europe, that is not what people mean by 'winter'.

I remember when I was a kid come November there was frost on the ground and the soil would gradually freeze and harden, creating the type of environment needed for snow to persist.

Twenty years have passed and it's all gone now. We have droughts in the summer though, for which we're largely unprepared because water retention was never a concern before.

That's climate change for you I guess.

People need to relax a little about absolute definitions of things.

Then again, perhaps we shouldn't be discussing time in terms of the seasons. Anyone in the southern hemisphere experiences the opposite, while people living in equatorial regions don't really share our notions of seasons (from my understanding).

Winter official definition is basically “astronomical Q1” which honestly isn’t all that useful in most cases. (It’s a bit stupid that our months, major holidays, and year almost but not quite align with the astronomical milestones).

They have a new catch phrase.

The way you're thinking of is the calendar based season which for the Northern hemisphere is Dec, Jan Feb (with each season being three consecutive months) - more specifically this is called the meteorological season. The astronomical season (which is the more "official" one) starts on 22 December and ends on 21 March.

But there's also a more informal usage, which is definitely prevalent in Europe, which is used to refer to the cold months of the year where you would typically have the heating on. For the UK this spans October to March for example. That doesn't mean you never have heating on in April, and it doesn't mean you _have_ to have the heating on in November. It's just a useful way of thinking about the period of time when gas/energy usage will be high and allows you to describe whether the period as a whole has been mild or particularly cold and the impact that's had on heating.

that has not been the case for the past few years. it’s getting hot much earlier.

I saw what you did, there…

I lived in London, back in the 1970s, and can confirm.

Generally, a rainy autumn. Sort of like Seattle, for the US folks familiar.

- Calendar winter: December first to February last.

- Metorological winter according to our meteorologists: "the period of the year where the daily average temperature is below zero degrees Celsius" [Sweden: https://www.smhi.se/kunskapsbanken/meteorologi/arstider/vint...] and [Norway: https://snl.no/vinter]

Today I learned of a third definition.

Now, usually the other definition people use relates to their locate climate for practical purposes.

Maybe it it time to rename it to “Firstwinter Day”! ;)

As I wrote, in European tradition 'winter' starts much earlier than the winter solstice because quite obviously the cold and grey months start earlier.

I am still puzzled that you never heard of 21st December being the beginning of the (astronomical) winter, like 21st June is beginning of summer, etc.

- Official communication (e.g. with tax authorities) use december first as first day of winter quarter.

- Social connotations use either a simplified version of the scientific/metrological definition (e.g. is it cold enough to be called winter yet? E.g. is it warm enough that winter has ended?) or calendar winter (dec-jan-feb).

- Historical reasons, late December is literally called "middle of the winter". Same thing with summer, it officially begins on June 1st and the summer solstice marks the "middle of summer" the same way "Mittwoch" marks the middle of the week.

- In the scientific literature I occasionally read (e.g. meteorology and biology) I read the definition is when the average daily temperature determines winter and never based on astronomy.

Some stats of my weather station in South Germany from this year and last year. It is much warmer this year, and even last year was pretty warm

Oct 2021: Avg: 8.5°C Min: 0.5°C Max: 22.0°C

Oct 2022: Avg: 12.7°C Min: 4.9°C Max: 21.5°C

Nov (1st to end of 11th) 2021: Avg: 4.1°C Min: -1.9°C Max: 9.4°C

Nov (1st to end of 11th) 2022: Avg: 7.8°C Min: 0.9°C Max: 15.8°C

I have no clue about weather forecasting and I can't exclude a drastic change in the coming months, but right now it just doesn't look like that at all

https://www.pud3.org/blog/articles--blog/behind-the-scenes-a...