When you live in California, it's hard to find reasons to love winter. We don't have any of the things that used to make me lover winter as a child: no snow, none of that smell the air gets just before it snows, no sledding, no fire in the fireplace (okay, we have a gas burning fireplace in our place here, but environmental and air quality issues aside, it's not the same if you're not burning real trees), no going out in the cold morning to split wood for the fire. (Yes, when I was a wee thing of 8 years old or so, my father taught me to split wood with an axe. It still seems strange to me how many dangerous and sharp-edged objects my father entrusted me with at an early age. I do recall that I was not permitted to use the chainsaw, so he did have some limits.)

But, anyway, as I was saying, winter in California is mostly just a drag. It rains more. It gets dark earlier. Wooo.

But there is one of my favorite signs of winter that we do get in California - Citrus fruit!!

A couple of weeks ago, I spied the first satsuma mandarins at the grocery store. And the other day, when I stopped in at Mollie Stone's on the way home from work, they had the fruit I would choose if I had to be stuck on a desert island with only one kind of fruit (a terrible thought) - blood oranges.

Suddenly, I feel much happier about it being December.

The internet says that blood orange season is December through March in California. I wonder how many blood oranges I can eat in the next 3.5 months?