White Christmas

Our area did not get the heavy snow that graced more northerly regions of the state and country, but when we got up this morning, the sidewalk, street, and parked cars were indeed white. I did not, however, wander outside to take a photo because the temperature was hovering near twenty degrees, and further documentation of the weather phenomenon that had been all over the Facebook feeds of half the people we know seemed unnecessary. Yes, on December 24, 2017, most of Ohio had snow.

I still remember December 24, 1983, my first Christmas Eve in the Mid-Ohio Valley, the year of the Great Christmas Blizzard. Several inches of snow were on the ground, and the temperature had been in the single digits all day. That night, it dropped to nine degrees below zero, and my poor little Mercury Comet, still acclimated to its previous Florida home, refused to start. Intrepid twentysomething that I was, I pulled on pantyhose, jeans, two pairs of socks, several shirts, boots, and an enormous wool cape with a hood and walked the frozen tundra of Third Street to a candlelight service, after which friends with a van took a small but enthusiastic group caroling to various elderly persons' homes. The cold was probably not good for our vocal chords, but no one seemed to mind.

I grew up with a white Christmas, but it was the white of South Florida sand, a very different thing. As a college student in Tampa, we knew it was Christmas because that was when the azaleas and house-high poinsettias bloomed.

For some reason, those December sights do not seem to make it onto Christmas cards very often, but I could do with white sand and palm trees about now.