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As November ended and December prepared for its debut, the District underwent its chilliest day of the season on Saturday, as the mercury dipped below freezing for the first time in months.

On Saturday, a month that began with a high temperature of 83 degrees ended in Washington with a morning low of 30 degrees. No lower reading had been recorded in the city since February.

For the first 29 days of the month, Washington’s overall temperature, accounting for both the daily highs and the daily lows, had been almost six degrees above average. It was a notably warm and almost eerily comfortable month.

But Saturday begged to differ. As of the late afternoon, with the high of 41 and low of two degrees below freezing, the day’s overall temperature came to nine degrees below average.

Wind enhanced Saturday’s wintry simulation. It was breezy, even windy at times. and wind chills resided in the upper 20s and lower 30s.

At least once, Washington felt an 18 mph wind; there was a brief gust of 28 mph. The northwest wind pulsed and pulled at hats and throbbed in ears.

Perhaps a single gesture might have been appropriate to both Saturday in itself and to its contrast to earlier November balminess.

That gesture may have been a sort of shrug. On the streets, people seemed to shrug themselves into the raised collars of their warm outerwear. They shrugged into the protection of scarves.

At the same time, students of the meteorological currents of daily life in the District may also have shrugged. Their shrugs may have represented philosophical resignation, a recognition of the inevitability of change in time, seasons and the daily weather.

Saturday, after all, if not formally a winter’s day, could be called winter-adjacent. It resided on the doorstep of December, a month that is regarded as the first of meteorological winter.

Moreover, the day of the solstice, the start of astronomical winter — widely regarded as the true start of the season — falls on Dec. 21. On Saturday, it was only three weeks away.

Even with blue skies, the sun seemed a little pale, and perhaps too weak to protect against the chill air.

With the sun spending the day low in the sky, the landscape seemed tinged with a faint orange glow.

It was the orange light that typically spreads at sunset, as the sun sinks in the sky. But on Saturday, with the sun never attaining any great elevation, the light seemed to arrive in early afternoon.

Three years' study of physics at the University of California at Berkeley

Martin Weil is a longtime reporter at The Washington Post.

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District’s cold falls below freezing for first time in months

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