Not Christmas weather

 Last week - back before finals - I decided I needed to go out and get the oil and filters changed in my car (I hadn't hit the requisite mileage, as the guy pointed out, but it had been more than six months, and also, I wanted the fluid levels checked). Because this place is ALWAYS busy, I decided to try when they opened on Saturday, so at quarter to eight I headed out.

I drove past campus. The "loop of lights" was still on (which is both strings of lights* wrapped around the trunks of the magnolias, and those wire-frame figures with colored lights forming their outline). It was a warmish morning for December - the upper 50s or low 60s, at any rate, I didn't need a jacket.

(*whitish-yellow and dark blue, the school colors, and I think of once when someone in our neighborhood put up all dark blue Christmas lights outside, my dad commented that somehow it made their house look sad. But then he always preferred multicolored lights)

And it made me think how different it feels here. It doesn't get as cold, and really, if we get cold and snow it's *late* in the season, like February, and I'm sure there's some climatic/atmospheric reason for that. This morning was foggy and overcast and yes, it did seem a little melancholy.

I don't mind fog but we've had so much of it lately. And I do find adverse weather (in the sense of being either unchanging - like the incredible long weeks of high heat and no rain in the summer, or extended periods of overcast) affects me more than it did before the pandemic.

But I also thought of Illinois, where there'd have been snow already. We don't often get white Christmases there but there have been a few, and often there is a little December snow, even when  it doesn't stick. 

And further back, to my childhood Christmases of the 1970s, in Ohio - at the edge of the lake-effect snow area, and in a decade that was one of the colder ones of the 20th century. Most years we had snow for Christmas, and the couple of years we did not, it was actually a big disappointment to child-me.

It's funny: snow is nice when you don't have to drive in it (either you're a child, or you don't have to go anywhere, or you have a good, reliable person who will drive you) but it's not so appealing when you have to drive (or walk, for that matter) in it. Though walking in very light snow, on sidewalks that have been plowed or shoveled and are clean, it's not bad. But wet snow isn't fun to walk in, and one thing I had forgotten after living down here - one Christmas when I got back up to Illinois, and went downtown for a bit after several inches of snow - the slush. The way snow gets half-melted and dirty in parking lots, and it's not pretty and not fun to walk through. 

But here, snow is rare. Sometimes we get cold and I admit I really like the COLD (like in the upper 20s) clear and dry days - I feel like I can breathe the cold dry air more easily and the world feels washed-new, especially if the sun is out. (I don't like cold and damp. I once opined that 40 degrees F and misting was more unpleasant than 25 F and dry and sunny - because with the cold dry weather you can put on another layer of clothes and be fine, but with cold and wet, you get cold through). 

But it is different, and I think a person's feelings about the holidays can be influenced by the weather. Often here it doesn't "feel like" Christmas to me, but part of that may be because until the semester fully ends and grades are in, I am very busy - I am busier in the last 2 to 3 weeks of school than I am the rest of the semester. But also, because the mental image of "Christmas" from my childhood is very much "there will be snow and cold."

Interestingly: I've read that the "image" many of us have of Christmas being snowy and cold and the whole Currier and Ives thing is really an artifact of the times that Currier and Ives were working and writers like Dickens (and those just before him) were writing: it was the tail end of what was called The Little Ice Age, a historically cooler period (ranging from roughly 1300-1850, put to an end once the Industrial Revolution really got going) and since we're in a warmer cycle now (which we have also contributed to), that image is largely illusory now. 

But still: I do like a little snow at Christmas. Just not when I'm having to drive somewhere