No Snow

I don't know about you, but for a born & raised Minnesotan like myself, having Christmas with no snow on the ground leaves me with a horribly empty feeling. As I sit at my parents' house typing this, I'm looking out the south facing windows and all I see is the black and gold of the plowed up corn fields along with the brown of the lawn and the empty gray of the leave-less trees. It's depressing, honestly.

There have been a couple of brown Christmases in my lifetime and each one sticks out in my memory because of the melancholy that the blacks and browns and deadness brought over the holiday moods. The white of the snow covering the ground and the frost glazing over the trees and the miles upon miles of bright landscapes is infinitely more appealing than the dark, grim death that permeates the freezing Minnesota environment when there is no snow around.

A few days ago there was some snowfall that came down and I was hopeful that it'd stay, but by the next morning it had almost all melted away. My parents even made the comment that we should put our presents on top of my car and take a family picture by it since the little bit of snow clinging to the top of it was the only snow in their part of the state.

Maybe the scientists are right and global warming is taking over. It seems like there wasn't a year that would go by in my childhood where we wouldn't already have a plethora of white, wonderful goodness scattered about the yard for snowball fights, snowman building, and sledding. Now it seems like we're lucky if we get any snow by the time December rolls around. We'll probably have our fair share of snow yet this winter, but wouldn't it have been beautiful to have it on Christmas Day? I think it would have.