Winter has arrived. One can go by the calendar, using either December 1 as the start of the "winter months," or use the Winter Solstice. The latter is beloved of radio disk jockeys and talk show hosts, who love to announce on December 22 that "this is the official beginning of winter" and mock those anonymous eggheads at the Naval Observatory or wherever who didn't notice we've had snow on the ground for a couple of weeks.

I go by the weather. When it feels like winter, it is winter. That's how our preliterate ancestors figured it. In New Orleans that means winter arrives when there's a nighttime frost, typically in January. And in Massachusetts it's winter when the snow falls and doesn't melt away. Fall is the season of red and gold fading to brown, but winter is the season of white.

Winter is also the traditional time for story-telling. In spring you're out planting, or tending the newborn lambs. In summer you're weeding, gathering hay, stockpiling firewood, picking early crops, and maybe going off to raid those bastards down the river who stole some cattle last year. And in fall you have to get in the harvest. Winter is down time, and the long nights in higher latitudes encourage that.

Families would gather around the fire in wintertime, and tell stories. During the year-long winter of 1816, Mary Shelley and friends made up Frankenstein and The Vampyre, essentially creating the modern horror genre over a long weekend. Even as late as Dickensian England, there was still the custom of telling ghost stories on Christmas Eve. (Which survives in the form of the annual Dr. Who Christmas special on the BBC.)

Storytelling is a custom which has sadly fallen out of fashion. People read stories and watch stories and listen to stories, all created by skilled professionals. The few storytellers around nowadays are also skilled professionals. Amateurs don't tell stories much any more.

So I'm going to propose a challenge for this winter. We've had "NaNoWriMo" and "Movember" and who knows what all else. Now it's time for "Winter's Tales." The rules are simple: before the first green shoots of spring appear, everyone should tell at least one story.

You have to have an audience, obviously. It can be one person or many. Firesides are optional. The story must be told verbally, though you can write it down later if you want. The story itself can be fiction or a reminiscence or even a tall tale. I'm going to use a little executive fiat here and say that jokes don't count. A story that's funny is fine, but actual set-piece jokes aren't stories.

You get bonus points if the story is original, but that's not mandatory. A spirited retelling of "Goldilocks and the Three Bears" or "The Golden Arm" is much better than a long pointless account of the time you had to spend all day in the airport because your flight was delayed.

In springtime I'll return to the topic, describe my own storytelling efforts, and let my vast readership tell about their own. Until then: it's story time.