“Just as a day may come at sunset into its most glorious hour, or a life toward the gray-bearded end enter a halcyon happiness, December golf, as long as it lasts, can seem the sweetest golf of the year,” John Updike wrote in an essay that first appeared in the December 1989 issue of Golf Digest.

That essay was recently republished and can be read online now, as so many things can.

“The course itself—its ice-edged water hazards, its newly erected snow fences—seems grateful to be visited” . . . as golfers and Updike fans are to have this essay in its entirety pop up this December.

Here’s the link.

“You seem to be, in December golf, reinventing the game, in some rough realm predating 15th-century Scotland,” Updike wrote, exhilarated by the “boarded-up clubhouse” and “naked trees” and absence of crowds in colorful clothing: “just golf-mad men and women, wearing wool hats and two sweaters each, moving on their feet” with a “running tally carried in the head of the accountant or retired banker in the group,” Updike wrote.