The cool morning air is a reminder that Maine’s beautiful fall season will be followed by cold, windy, snowy days before too long.Outdoor enthusiasts look forward to downhill and cross-country skiing, sledding, skating, hiking and other popular winter pastimes, while others will snuggle up on the couch in a warm house with a good book or the remote in their hand.

Television has something for nearly everyone these days, from naked survivor shows to adult sex movies which leave nothing to the imagination. Shows which once bleeped out “dirty words’’ now use them profusely. To be fair, there are many wonderful nature and history offerings and television has become a major learning tool for not only youngsters, but for us all.

We’ve come to appreciate the fact that so many of the popular television shows from the past have made a comeback because the demand is apparently there.When we surf the channels to see what’s coming on, unless there’s something special we want to watch, nine times out of ten we find ourselves selecting an entertaining rerun of an oldie. Some of them even run without commercial interruption!

We’re sure many TV stations are taking advantage of the fact that these oldies are available at far less cost than new programming, which is great as far as we’re concerned.Today, TV viewers can watch reruns of hundreds of old shows — “Emergency,” “Abbott and Costello,” “The Honeymooners,” “Cheers,” “Car 54,” “Mr. Ed,” “I Love Lucy,” “The Beverly Hillbillies,” “Andy Griffith,” “Happy Days,” “Gomer Pyle.” The list goes on and on. Not many new westerns are being made today, so TV has compensated for that fact by bringing back “Gunsmoke,” “The Rifleman,” “Wagon Train,” “Daniel Boone” and scores of other western TV shows as well as old movies. When we say “old,’’ some of them are black and white and date back to the early 1940s.

A TV staple for years has been “M.A.S.H.,” which remains one of our favorites. We’ve seen most of the shows multiple times and appreciate the humor of the original book’s author, Richard Hornberger from Medomak.We remember early on in the show being told by the late Dr. Carl “Russ’’ Griffin, who had served in a mobile Army surgical hospital himself, that the author had captured the true spirit of the hospitals, where it was necessary to laugh if you were to keep your sanity.

We also find the early game shows lots of fun, even when contestants are told they could win a “brand new’’ 1970s era car.The shows must attract a pretty good audience, because we see that a couple of them have been recreated and updated with minor changes.

We find being housebound (sometimes by choice) on a cold winter’s day isn’t so bad, after all.