As long as I can remember, I have always hated February.

It’s a bitter, cold month and one that’s filled with what feels like preternatural darkness. You can get a whiff of spring in February, it’s true — but it’s a faraway scent, not close enough to grab. February, I always reasoned, is a dead month, just cold, black space near the front of the calendar. A useless month. The worst of them all.

But then, a few years ago, I changed my mind about that, and for no particular reason.

February is bleak, sure enough — but it’s a passageway to the end of winter rather than a dismal beginning.

That’s right, November, I’m talking to you. When it comes to truly wretched months, November climbed right over February on my list of reasons to weep and mull the bleach bottle.

There are many reasons for this. By the start of November, summer is not just dead — it has been embalmed, buried and forgotten.

When November comes along, it comes trumpeting the end of all good things. The splendor of autumn, with its bright-colored leaves and fantastic promise of Indian summer? Gone. The magic of baseball? Gone. Halloween? Only recently dead, but gone.

Everything, gone.

November is the most moribund month of the year, a time that has nothing to offer but a dull celebration centering on a dead bird stuffed in your oven. Yippee and yahoo. Perhaps after said bird is devoured, I will lie down and not get up again. What would be the point?

November is roughly as cheerful as the dolorous screaming hinges of a tomb door as it closes forever to bring eternal night. Yuck, I say, and blech and bleh. February WISHES it could be as morose as November.

And yet, incredibly, I find that neither November nor February can any longer hold that most reviled spot in the blackest corner of my heart. November and February, on this particular journey around the sun, have been replaced by an impossibly crueler and colder and more conniving month.

I give you January — the fat, frozen icicle that stirs the poisonous drink that is winter. I give you a month that feels like a cruel and unusual prison sentence that’s only just begun.

January, a month that never troubled me before, seems insistent, this time around, on throwing me to the ground, rubbing my face in the snow and shoving chunks of ice down the back of my pantaloons.

And it starts on New Year’s Day, a bleak, post-celebratory day of darkness that to me has always felt like one big, desolate Sunday (I hate Sundays) even if it happened to fall in the middle of the week.

January — this one, anyway — feels like a crippling hangover, even if you haven’t had a drop. It’s a 31-day stretch of shivering and sneezing and snuffling while a faraway sun offers no comfort. It’s a pointless, skeleton Christmas tree in the corner waiting for somebody to declare it dead and carry it to the curb.

January is a preview of a cold and loveless death.

You know. This one, anyway.

I realize that this disdain for something as artificial as a calendar month is slightly irrational. It’s also deeply personal — if you’re one of those people who skis, snowmobiles, ice fishes or simply drinks a lot in the dark, January is probably a delightful time.

“I LOVE January!” says the clearly demented Nancy Townsend Johnson of Oxford County. “So clean and new. Gone is the clutter of the holidays, and people have settled down.”

And good for you, people. I aspire to be one of those who conquers the seasons rather than be conquered by them.

But this year? Nope. January has me by its mandibles. It’s shaking me back and forth like a plaything, filling my head with the throbbing ache of ennui. It offers only ice and snow and cold to fill the hours that are not already occupied by brooding, gloom and cabin fever.

In the grisly death of all good things, January is the murder weapon.

It’s a month so wicked and sadistic and manipulative that it has forced me to utter words I never believed could form in my mouth:

Man, I can’t wait for February.

Mark LaFlamme is a Sun Journal staff writer. Email groundhog photos to mlaflamme@sunjournal.com.