Arctic winds, snow and frosts have come in such a blast this winter that the bookmakers report record numbers of bets on a white Christmas so early in December. The Met Office has issued a blizzard of severe weather warnings, telling us to wrap up warm, take care on the roads, generally scaring the living daylights out of everyone about the perils of cold.

Suddenly we seem to be facing a Siberian freeze, which may come as shock because, yes, winter can be cold. This is what a British winter is supposed to be like, but for many years autumn has almost slipped seamlessly into springtime with hardly a pause for winter. But we should be more chilled out about the cold because it actually does a power of good.

Cold is Nature's clock, telling plants and animals that it's time to pack up and go to sleep, go away or fatten up. Without the cold, living things don't know when winter has come and gone, or when to get going again in springtime. Recent winters have been so mild that they have left Nature thoroughly confused.

Birds don't know whether to migrate, hedgehogs and bats wake up too early from hibernation. Plants such as the white deadnettle carry on flowering all year and the grass carries on growing, so the nation has reverberated to the sound of lawnmowers all winter long.

For lovers of blackcurrants, cold is absolute bliss because the plants need a decent spell of chilled weather to develop properly the next season, as do many British types of apples, pears and raspberries. Without the cold many varieties are teetering on the edge of extinction, and the lack of cold winters has spelt near-disaster for the Rhubarb Triangle between Leeds, Bradford and Wakefield.

There the prized early rhubarb crop must be cold-hardened before it is plunged into dark sheds to grow its fabulous pink stalks. But cold spells are running desperately short, and long gone are the days of the “Pink Express” train that brought tons of the crop down to London.

A proper winter rejuvenates the countryside. It can be cruel, but is necessary to get rid of the weak and to prepare the way for fresh growth. Many native trees need a spell of chilly weather to rest before sprouting, or to make their seeds germinate. It can help to clean out some nasty foreign pests and diseases that ravage trees such as the horse chestnut, which is blighted by a leafminer pest and fungus disease. The cold knocks back these and many other pests and diseases. As any gardener knows, decent frosts kill off bugs in well-dug ground.

Sheep and cattle farmers will also breathe a sigh of relief as the cold hits the midges carrying the appalling bluetongue disease that has recently invaded Britain.

This cold snap is reminiscent of the savage freezes of long ago. The winter of 1962-63 is now a hazy memory, but it was so cold that pneumatic drills were used to dig up turnips in frozen fields, ice floes bobbed around in the Channel and cars were driven over the frozen Thames at Oxford.

People were geared up to big freezes in those days. They wore balaclavas and thick coats, made roaring fires and stoked up on bowls of proper porridge. Now we have central heating at the flip of a switch, heated cars, artificial ice rinks and fake frost on windows at Christmas. It's all too namby-pamby.

Although we moan, the cold could do us the power of good. In Siberia they swim outdoors in minus 40C to stay immune, they claim, from pneumonia and colds. The Finns jump stark naked from steaming sauna to freezing lakes. In Britain we drop like flies at the first sniff of a cold snap. We are so helplessly unprepared, that it's a wonder we know what snow looks like. The Met Office has even launched a health forecasting service tailored to warn vulnerable patients of expected drops in temperatures.

So forget the doom and gloom - we should revel in the cold. Look at the magnificent spectacle of the countryside covered in thick frost like icing sugar, icicles hanging off trees and fingers of Jack Frost painted across windows. These are things that we truly long for, something embedded in our national psyche, which helps to explain our obsession with a white Christmas.

For that we can probably thank Charles Dickens, who lived through some bitter winters and conjured up the classic Christmas images of snow, skating on frozen lakes, huge puddings and the rest. That Dickensian enthusiasm now translates into the millions of pounds that are bet on a white Christmas - defined as a single snowflake falling anytime on December 25 at a designated location monitored by the Met Office. But be warned, there's always more chance of snow at Easter than Christmas.

And even if the cold is too much to bear, there could still be some good news. The Met Office is sticking to its forecast of a milder than average winter So, if December remains cold, the chances are that January and February should be an improvement, and things can only get better if you are hoping for warm weather in the new year.

Paul Simons writes the Weather Eye column for The Times

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