My favorite time of year at my college radio station was winter break. Though we were student-run and largely student-staffed, we were also proudly on the air every day of the year, including Christmas. We labored on with our skeleton crew, many of taking an on-air shift or two every day. It was dead-quiet like no other time of the year. During the summers, there were classes happening in our building, and the campus was infiltrated by a bevy of conferences, camps and other events that caused child prodigies and health nuts to mingle awkwardly with our lingering student population. But it was completely different during winter break. The dorms were shut down and off-limits, the University Center was closed for business, and the academic building we resided in didn’t have any who wasn’t affiliated with the radio station cross its threshold for weeks. Those of us doing radio were all alone on campus, and the isolation was strangely rewarding, an extension of the soothing loneliness of a late-night broadcast studio.

Compounding the feeling was the fact that it was usually damn cold outside. We were in central Wisconsin in December and January. The temperature outside could go days without crossing out of single digits, and the city was usually smothered in a thick quilt of snow and ice. Even the air seemed different, as if it were taking on the bluish sheen of frost, like it was heavy curtains that needed to be pushed through to reach a destination. It was forbidding enough that many people, freed from most work responsibilities, stayed in the toasty comfort of their homes so even the abandoned street outside the station window conveyed the message that were alone in this chilly world. When dusk was settling in and I peered out the icy glass to the street, it could feel like I was DJing at some arctic outpost. And, for that matter, why would I want to go out in that when I had all these great records at my home away from home.

Much as I loved (as I think all radio DJs love) playing the perfect summer pop song on a great sunny day, I also really liked finding those tracks that conveyed the feel on the opposite end of the weather spectrum. If a band was from Minneapolis, for instance, it was a pretty good bet that they’d know the way winter could transform existence for a little while, how it could just shut down the world. I gave airtime to “Snow Days” from Trip Shakespeare a lot during those colder months, and it did indeed sound a little better, a little more right, when the snow was falling as it played.

Trip Shakespeare, “Snow Days”

(Disclaimer: The album that contains this song appears to be out of print, although it is available for digital purchase. You can certainly acquire some music through those means, and cross fingers that some of the money makes its way to the artist instead of just rolling into some record company slush fund. But really what you should be doing this holiday season is heading to a local, independently-owned record store and making a few purchase there so they are the beneficiaries of holiday largess just as assuredly as the big box store located in the ugly sprawl on the edge of town. If you don’t have any business that matches those criteria near you, I can humbly suggest a fine establishment that I know is good at phone orders. Regardless, it’s important for me to note that I’ll remove this song from this corner of the Interwebs if contacted by anyone who insists that’s the necessary course of action.)