The storybook vision of Christmas includes a crackling fire, snow falling outside and a brightly decorated Christmas tree. There’s a growing demand for real Christmas trees, according to market research firm Mordor Intelligence, which found that millennial households are looking for real trees as biodegradable and recyclable options. For those in the real tree camp, it’s not just about having a tree. It’s about the process of picking one that tradition and nostalgia demands. Press Herald photographers went looking for the real thing.

It’s 4 p.m. in December, and the sun is setting. While the poet Dylan Thomas urged us to “rage, rage against the dying of the light,” songwriter and poet Paul Simon addressed the darkness as “my old friend.” We can’t escape the early darkness and the long nights of winter, however we choose to react. So we eat, drink, light candles and sing as we watch the sun set, until finally it’s spring.

“Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns,” wrote Mary Ann Evans, who later took the pen name George Eliot, to her tutor Maria Evans when she was about 22 years old. Press Herald photographers recorded the rich reds, greens, golds and browns of the season.

Red is a strong color. It can represent passion, happiness, danger or beauty. In China, it is the traditional color worn by brides and symbolizes joy, luck and happiness. In Japan, bridges in the gardens of temples are painted red because they are passages to sacred places, and red is thought to expel evil. In ancient Rome, the words for beautiful and red were identical. In some places in Central Africa, red can also represent mourning and death. The Red Cross changed its colors to green and white in parts of the continent. But red is a friend to photographers. A small splash of it can go a long way to making a good photo. Here are some examples of Press Herald photographers seeing red.

It begins unofficially after Memorial Day, with flowers in full bloom in June and ever-lengthening hours of sunshine. July brings the heat, warmer ocean water in the southern part of the state – and the tourists. It begins to slip through our fingers in August, all too soon. Summer in Maine.

Our photographers capture the dreary and the glorious of April before it finally yields to the sunshine of true spring.

Daylight saving time started again on Sunday, leading to dreams of those long summer nights in Maine, when the sun doesn’t set until after 8 p.m. There’s a bipartisan bill in Congress now, called the Sunshine Protection Act of 2021, sponsored by politicians as different as U.S. Sens. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., and Ed Markey, D-Mass., that would make DST permanent. If it passes, we would not switch our clocks back in the fall. Meanwhile, Press Herald photographers took advantage of our lengthening days to look for beautiful light.

Love it or hate it, winter is here, in all its icy glory. When you are freezing outside – your feet like stone, your fingers, white marble – consider the miracle of ice. Water, liquid and gas, made solid. Look closely and you’ll find its otherworldly beauty.