The clocks were set back a week ago Sunday, and in Chicago the sun now goes down before five. I find it kind of depressing. Which is probably why this is the time of year many of us start planning our escape from winter. Skiers are the exception, and plenty of them head for the slopes as soon as the first snow falls. For the rest of us, I want to make the case for going the other way, at least once, to somewhere people fully embrace enjoying the cold.

I say that as someone who loves a Chicago winter. I worked in the city for more than 35 years, and some of my best hours came after the first snows, walking through the Loop, along the Chicago River and out to Lake Michigan. Some of the most beautiful sights came during my years at the University of Chicago, traipsing across campus in the first snow: bright lights on the Gothic buildings and excited students packing snowballs.

By March I've changed my mind. The snowbanks at the curb have gone black, the weather is about the same as it was in January, and I start looking at flights. Around this point I begin taking the gray skies personally.

Kari Leibowitz, a young American psychology student, went to Tromsø, Norway, on a Fulbright scholarship to study seasonal depression. Tromsø sits about 200 miles north of the Arctic Circle, and from November 21 to about January 21, the sun never makes it above the mountains around town.

Her Norwegian adviser told her that people in Tromsø hold up well through the winter. A study of nearly 9,000 residents had found less winter depression than you would predict that far north. People there looked forward to the polar night.

Leibowitz surveyed 238 Norwegians in Oslo, Tromsø and Svalbard about how they think of winter. Those who saw it as a season full of things to enjoy reported more life satisfaction and better mental health. That outlook grew even stronger the farther north she went. The survey shows a link between the two, and Leibowitz came away convinced that people can learn to embrace the cold. In 2024 she wrote a book, How to Winter: Harness Your Mindset to Thrive on Cold, Dark, or Difficult Days.

The Norwegians she met did specific things. They dressed for the cold and went outside anyway. They gathered with friends by candlelight and had a word for that warmth on a cold, dark night: koselig.

Traveling from the cold to the cold may sound backward. Your friends who spend the winter somewhere sunny will be happy to tell you so. For most of our working lives, the question never came up. Vacation meant a week or two, often fitting around school calendars, and winter was something to stay home through or fly away from. Many of us now have more say over when we go. That makes winter worth an experiment.

Take Jokkmokk, a town of about 3,000 just north of the Arctic Circle in Swedish Lapland. Every February for more than 400 years, the Indigenous Sámi from across the north have gathered there for a winter market, and the town swells to around 50,000 people. The temperature can drop to minus 30 Celsius, and the crowds stay outside anyway. Reindeer race across the frozen lake. Stalls sell antler handicrafts, and the evenings fill with concerts and talks.

In Sapporo, huge snow sculptures fill the city center for a week in early February. Québec City holds a ten-day carnival with night parades and teams paddling and dragging canoes across the ice floes of the St. Lawrence.

You must go in winter to see any of them. The people who run these events spend the year getting ready for the coldest weeks.

All that said, I won't be toughing out a Chicago March. When the gray wears me down, I'll get on a plane to somewhere warm.