I walked away from my rig, dusk darkening the firs and pines to a shade more black than green, and I felt the loneliness peculiar to the woods on the cusp of a wintry twilight.

Night comes to the forest not in stages, as it does in town with its many sources of artificial illumination, but with a suddenness.

It’s a trifle scary.

The darkness is so complete, so inevitable and so pitiless, that it can at times feel malevolent.

This is an illusion, of course.

But it can be an especially convincing one after the coming of the cold, cruel and insensate, demanding that you either keep moving to produce heat or be capable of making fire or shelter.

Darkness advances more gently when snow lies on the ground, the white layer accentuating the weakening light.

I noticed this when I went for a short hike along Elk Creek, southwest of Baker City, late on a November afternoon.

The light was strong — the day was partly cloudy — until I descended into Elk Creek’s modest canyon. In the span of a quarter-mile and a few minutes, it seemed as though time had advanced an hour or more. The sun had gone below the ridge that rises west of the stream, and in the few seconds while I stood beside the open passenger door, making sure I had tucked the keys into my coat’s inner pocket, the chill sunk in, making the skin on my face feel tight.

I have walked this road probably 20 times or more over the years, including during winter. But I hadn’t gone that way, in the snow, since last year.

Snow, of course, changes landscapes in ways both subtle and dramatic.

Like pancake makeup, snow hides surface imperfections. A rough gravel road becomes a smooth white surface, a canvas awaiting not a painter’s brush but the hooves of deer and the diminutive feet of squirrels.

Snow also, as I mentioned, affects the quality of the light as afternoon gives way to evening.

Where the road beside Elk Creek bisected a dense patch of woods it was so dark I wished I had brought a flashlight or headlamp.

But then I would round a corner into more open ground and the gloom of impending night dispersed, the daylight again ascendent, albeit briefly.

It was a fine time, and place, for a hike.

The day was still, the only sound the musical trickle of the stream, amplified slightly by the somewhat hollow timbre of water splashing against flute-shaped ice sculptures.

I enjoy those moments at the threshold of night, when the dark captures the forest, and every clump of pines, seen peripherally, might be a predator, or concealing one.

• • •

The radio station I listen to most — 95.3 KKBC, which bills itself as The Boomer — switches to a Christmas-only playlist after Thanksgiving.

I started the car that day, hoping to hear, say, Thin Lizzy or Duran Duran, but instead what I got was Gene Autry doing “Rudolph, The Red-Nosed Reindeer.”

A classic, to be sure.

But I punched the seek button anyway, settling for a static-clogged station from Boise that was playing U2’s “Where The Streets Have No Name.”

(A track from the Irish band’s “The Joshua Tree,” an album that, I can scarcely believe, will turn 36 next spring. But considering that an even more iconic record, Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” just passed its 40th birthday, I suppose I ought not be surprised.)

I cherish holiday music.

Just as the season would be incomplete without snow and “The Grinch” and the sharp scent in our home of a freshly cut fir, so too would I feel bereft if I didn’t hear Nat King Cole’s version of “The Christmas Song,” which caresses my ears as smoothly as egg nog goes down my throat.

(It strikes me as appropriate, if not inevitable, that this standard was written by Mel Tormé, also known as the Velvet Fog.)

But there is a month between Thanksgiving and Christmas.

And although the canon of Christmas classics is extensive, when they’re in constant rotation that long even my favorites can become cloying while the Advent calendar still has several unopened windows.

This distinguishes Christmas songs from other pop and rock music.

I can, for instance, listen to pretty much anything by The Beatles or The Cars or

The Go-Go’s, to name but three bands, at any time of year without my ears becoming fatigued.

But Bruce Springsteen’s live version of “Santa Claus Is Coming To Town,” although definitive, is meant to be heard only during December — and not every day even then.

I’m satisfied with three to five listenings each Christmas season.

My tolerance is similarly limited for most of the other songs that I greet, like old friends, every December. I’m loath to compile a list — it would be too long for this space — but as an illustration of how eclectic the options are, here’s a handful that never fail to warm my heart:

• Brenda Lee, “Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree.”

• John Lennon: “Happy Xmas (War Is Over).”

• Band Aid: “Do They Know It’s Christmas?”

• The Royal Guardsmen: “Snoopy’s Christmas.”

• Bing Crosby: “White Christmas.”

Probably I should just avoid 95.3 until around Dec. 10.

Except then I would miss several playings of the one Christmas song that never seems to get stale.

“The Chipmunk Song (Christmas Don’t Be Late)” might be the silliest Christmas song of all — and this is a category hardly deficient in schmaltz.

But nobody — neither Andy Williams nor Jose Feliciano nor Burl Ives nor any of the other performers who are known best for their Christmas songs — can conjure my childhood as poignantly as Simon and Theodore.

And, of course, Alvin.

Sorry.

I meant, Alvin!