After sleeping on it and not being "in love" with any of the options, I pulled the white back out and think maybe it will work best after all.
Last night when I was looking at white, I thought it was too "washed out" but maybe that is because I was envisioning going dark and my brain was not adjusting. Or it's that I rarely use white as a background, so I'm not drawn to it.
Or it's that we just got 18" of snow and when I look out the window, all I see is white! The grass had just started to get a tinge of green before this hit, and now we have even more in the forecast. Looks like spring is not going to happen here this year. The first year I moved here, we had 90 degree weather in mid April. That's not super common either, but more common than over a foot of snow.