The wonder of winter

So that's it, then. Autumn is over, baby, like your last-but-one love affair. It's been colder in Wales than at the north pole, and any part of the country that hasn't yet seen snow can expect some right about . . . now. Anyone who claims that, strictly speaking, the seasons don't change until the solstice, and that's a whole three weeks away, can expect to end up face down in the first available snowdrift. Winter's here!

And Britain's making a meal of it. This week's buzzwords are "chaos" and "misery". Remember last time, say the veterans of 2009-10. The coldest winter for a generation, that was. Motorways were closed; thousands of flights and trains were cancelled; more than 2,000 Eurostar passengers were trapped in the Channel tunnel; Gordon Brown himself was forced to worry about grit . . . Then there was that man in the Highlands whose wife popped out to buy a turkey and couldn't get back to him for a month. And those 50 snowed-in customers who were forced to kip down in John Lewis! It was like Stalingrad, only with fewer cannibals.

Fair enough: last winter was an ordeal for many people. But there would still have been whingeing if it had been warm enough to convert everyone to naturism. It starts every year, long before the first flake falls, as soon as the clocks go back. Most of the nation starts channelling that annoying little faun in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, fretting about the spell the White Witch has cast over the land of Narnia. "Always winter and never Christmas", boo-hoo.

Yet winter can be something to look forward to. It can be magnificent and mysterious and sporty and sexy. It's not as indecently eager-to-please as spring, summer or autumn, but it's every bit as enjoyable if you accept it for what it is, stop dressing as if you live in the tropics and actually stick your nose out of the door rather than sit by the radiator and sulk. This is something we seem to unlearn as we get older. You don't hear kids moaning about the snow and ice – or at least no more than they moan about everything.

Here's the other side of winter. The smell of snow in the air. Waking up after the first heavy fall, ground blanketed in white. The stillness and the silence. Hoar frost on bushes. Breath smoking in front of you. The brightest moonlight you will ever see. Stars like golden pinpricks. Bootprints frozen in mud. The tracks of cats and mice and birds and squirrels. Brueghel's Hunters in the Snow. Wyke's Thames Frost Fair. High blue skies. The delicate crust on a half-frozen puddle. Streams narrowed by ice. The smell of wood fires. Hot chocolate in the snow. Mulled wine. Sloe gin. Spiced cider. Chestnuts roasting over charcoal. Throwing snowballs for a dog to catch. Christmas markets. Snowmen. Igloos. Gingerbread. Stollen and mince pies and reindeer-print jumpers. Christmas itself, if you don't let it take over your life. The way your skin tightens in the cold. Wind soughing in the chimney. Fencing with icicles. Snow angels.

Even conversations are transformed. As Virginia Woolf put it, "Never are voices so beautiful as on a winter's evening, when dusk almost hides the body, and they seem to issue from nothingness with a note of intimacy seldom heard by day." In Siberia they say your very breath can freeze and fall to the ground. It's known as shopot zvyozd, or the "whispering of the stars". That's something to mention the next time someone quotes Robert Byrne: "Winter is nature's way of saying, 'Up yours.'"

There's more. Christmas Day swims. Deserted beauty spots. Muddy footpaths that are once more usable. Snowball fights. Shaking a loaded branch above an unprotected head. Running away before you get your comeuppance. Tom Jones and Cerys Matthews hamming their way through Baby It's Cold Outside. Skiing. Fondue. Skidding the car but not quite crashing it. Having a lie-in and telling your boss the train broke down. Air so cold it makes your lungs throb. A kiss on a frozen cheek. Lambswool scarves. Sleigh bells.

Don't take my word for it. Over at the Experience Project, which claims to be "the world's largest living collection of shared experiences", you'll find more than 400 comments under the heading "I love winter". Denverguy reckons "the coldness gives a great excuse to cuddle"; Darkstep loves the way that "if you stand really still during a slow snowfall, you can hear the snowflakes hit the ground". That's a couple more pluses for the pile. "I'm just melting thinking about it," says pvtlchurch. And who in their right mind wouldn't? The writer Bill Morgan once imagined winter "quietly pirouetting in on silvery-toed slippers of snow".

And those long nights and short days? The inhabitants of Svalbard, far north of the Norwegian mainland, won't see the sun again until late January. According to Mark Sabbatini, editor of the archipelago's newspaper icepeople.net, the polar night is such a whirl of socialising and festival-going that no one has time to get bored.

Not that you have to mingle. This is also a great time for loners. "There is a privacy about it which no other season gives you," wrote the gardening expert Ruth Stout. "In spring, summer and fall people sort of have an open season on each other; only in the winter, in the country, can you have longer, quiet stretches when you can savour belonging to yourself."

Do you remember being a kid and counting the days until Santa arrived, thinking again and again about Christmases past and the one to come? Some of us feel that way about this whole season. I keep revisiting those frosty mornings when I went hiking through the hills with my baby daughter in a bright pink sling on my chest. The Boxing Day when I cycled for hours down a canal towpath, my tyre tracks the only scars in the snow. A sunny January afternoon, crunching through a flooded meadow, ankle-deep in ice and water. December at the top of the ski slopes, driving through a white-out with my now grown-up child leaning out of the car window and shouting directions.

Have we mentioned blizzards? Yes, they can be dangerous, but what a thrill to be cut off from the rest of the world, nothing but white around, above and beneath you. Is this something you can only experience abroad, perhaps with wolves and polar bears waiting for a chance to leap on you? Hardly. Last time I saw a wall of snow racing towards me was in a park in Hove.

If just the idea makes you shiver, try not to dwell on the Great Frost of 1709, the coldest winter that Europe had seen for 500 years. According to Niles's Weekly Register, all of the continent's rivers and "narrow seas" froze over. In Britain, a great "frost fair" sprang up on the Thames. "The Thames seems now a solid rock of ice," one newspaper reported, "and booths for sale of brandy, wine, ale, and other exhilarating liquors, have been for some time fixed thereon; but now it is in a manner like a town; thousands of people cross it, and, with wonder, view the mountainous heaps of water that now lie congealed into ice."

Woolf, whose centuries-spanning novel Orlando made a brief stop in 1709, claimed that "birds froze in mid-air and fell like stones to the ground. At Norwich a young countrywoman started to cross the road in her usual robust health and was seen by the onlookers to turn visibly to powder and be blown in a puff of dust over the roofs as the icy blast struck her at the street corner . . . Corpses froze and could not be drawn from the sheets. It was no uncommon sight to come upon a whole herd of swine frozen immovable upon the road."

Now, that's a winter, though for showmanship 1814 just about tops it. That was the year an elephant was led across the Thames near Blackfriars bridge.

Have a root through your photographs and perhaps you'll find something to rekindle your own winter fever. I'm looking at my neighbour's border collie, the sweetest dog in the world, barking his way through a snowdrift. Here's a famously grumpy friend, building an igloo with his almost-as-excited young son; and my niece and nephew sliding across a hard-frozen pond. Here's a hole cut in the snow, just big enough to hold a deckchair and a bottle or two of beer; there's shot after shot of monochrome but magical forests and fields. Even a photo of a logpile might start you dreaming. "Imagine those burning in an open fire . . ."

For some of us, the fear is not that winter will be long and cold, but that it will fizzle out after a week or two. Which is why I'm glad to be in France at the moment, in a mountainous bit called the Vosges, where you can count on months of ice and snow. I've seen it start in early October, with the cows still in the fields, and this year there were still patches on the ground in late April. Minus 12C or 13C is routine; no one bats an eyelid until it approaches -20C. Don't the locals feel the cold? Of course they do. But, unlike some people, they'll put a bloody jumper on when they need one.

Add some decent outerwear and a cheap pair of snowshoes, and you can explore spots that are inaccessible for the rest of the year. By February, unless there's a warm snap, the lakes will have a thick covering of ice, and skaters and walkers will head out from the shore (please don't try this in Britain, unless you're desperate to die). The stretch of water closest to me is more than 2km from end to end. How great would it be to stand in the middle of that, with or without an elephant?

It started snowing here a week ago, and it's barely stopped since – first great white feathers, then nervous little wisps and now the robust middleweights that you know are here to stay. The snow is now knee-high. The ploughs are out, and in case they can't keep up the roads are edged with red-and-white poles to give drivers some clue about where the tarmac ends and the grass begins. The supermarkets are full of snow shovels and tyre chains, and the garages are doing a roaring trade in winter tyres.

Outside the house, every birch twig is picked out in white, every spruce branch sags under its frozen load. Is this really something to be miserable about? Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.