Southern Vermont Winter Ambience: Snow, Wind, and Late-Night NYE Musings

We’re ending the year in a wonderfully bleak Vermont valley, already covered in snow and taking on more. Spend the night listening as the small flakes pile up around you and the winds howl over the peaks.

The holidays are gone, we flip the calendar back to the beginning with a new number to reign over it all. January, 2026. Ensconced in winter’s tomb until mid-April. But it sure looks pretty. The slight nighttime glow of Vermont’s small giants, the Green Mountains, covered in white, can make even the dullest early months feel magical.

Just don’t forget to silence your phone — while we may be near South Royalton and far enough from everywhere else — the 5G will still bring in the incessant pocket buzzing of your phone (This is Vermont not the Oort cloud. You can get NYE messaging here).

Look, I’m pretty sure many of the other New Year’s–adjacent uncommon ambience posts are painted with personal feelings about my least favorite holiday. I’m not here to rain on anyone’s ball droppings — I’ve done that enough already.

This is the day we celebrate “new beginnings” while our health care costs reset, local governments enact unpopular new rules, and we stand in front of couches or bar stools toasting “my year!”

And all night, messages and group chat alerts from all the people in our lives.

The cinephile friends continuing their NYE phone-buzzing group chat that you somehow got added to. Tonight they started a movie together at an exact time so the Statue of Liberty smashes the roof of the Manhattan Museum of Art at exactly midnight.

And you know damn well why you were added to that group — it was that movie take you absentmindedly assented that got you added to that group chat. Something about Rachel Dawes being swapped with Ellie Burr without changing either movie. It was a crowded party. A buddy was dangling on a trembling limb of being labeled “weird,” and so you swooped in with a reflexive “totally agree.”

Now you’re in a movie-people chat. Tonight they’re watching Ghostbusters II, randomly dealing out their dark-horse New Year’s movies, when — guys — you won. We’ve ceded Die Hard to Christmas. We don’t need to do that with every holiday.

There will be folks accounting for an earlier wave of pocket buzzing — the folks who don’t salute any dropping ball and want that known. Sending out all flavors of “in bed at 8 p.m., ttyl!”

Also, the post-midnight flurry of photos: sleeping children. They almost made it! Oh, how wholesome. You knew Anderson Cooper and platform-specific lip-synching wasn’t going to keep your kids awake.

The counter-culture folks still picking up Animal Crossing New Leaf for their long abandoned town’s celebration —

And… I’m mocking NYE again — probably for the third year in a row.

Maybe spend a quiet evening amongst the snow of Southern Vermont. It’ll work great at counteracting whatever fireworks your neighbor saved from the 4th of July and is definitely setting off tonight. Nighttime winter Southern Vermont snow. Wind over the Green Mountains, falling snow, and quiet rural winter sounds. An ambient sound podcast episode for sleep, focus, and relaxation (trying some SEO suggestions from a pal as I typically use this entire text block to rant — I wouldn’t need to do this if y’all felt like subscribing to uncommon ambience).

Make it your New Year’s resolution to subscribe to the scrappy little sound podcast that only wants success for you in the new year — unless you’re evil.

Episode art made in photoshop.