White Christmas

Two years ago, about ten days after Thanksgiving, we had an ice storm of literary proportions. From approximately noon on a Thursday, to 5:00am the following Friday, the storm produced a continuous shower of fountain soda sized chunks, littering the ground like a hyperactive ice machine.

We were ill-prepared. Though we’d purchased beer and snacks and plenty of cigarettes, no one had considered the pressing need for batteries or candles. A realization we all had, sometime around 3am, hearing distant transformers cover the 1812 overture and giant tree branches splinter from trunks with a crack. Our tenuous connection to electric power, and by extension, the modern era was short-lived. And we tried to make light of it, noting the premonitory half-second outages always caused the CD player to start over, playing the first track on the Classic Queen CD “Kind of Magic,” at least four or five times. When I went to bed that night, I turned the baseboard heat in my bedroom up to its highest setting, and sweltered under many blankets, waiting for the inevitable cold and dark.

The power blew, finally, at about 5:30am.

By nightfall of the following day, I had accepted a humiliating, yet completely true fact about myself.

I’m a total wuss when it comes to cold temperatures.

For those of you who subscribe to some notion of geographical determinism, this should come as no great surprise. I’m from the mountains, yes, but the mountains below the Mason-Dixon line, where wintertime temperatures average out well above freezing and blizzards are rare. Seven inches of snow still cancels school for the better part of a week. Sure, we have four seasons, and it’s not unusual to get a little wintry participation, but seriously, a single digit wind chill gets top billing on the evening news. Some beefy local weatherman, who both looks and talks like an evangelist, makes ominous pronouncements of the “Do not go outdoors unless you absolutely have to. Prolonged exposure to such temperatures can be fatal” variety[1]. Which is true, I guess, but does little to explain the mystery of how people in Minneapolis function in January. Do they just not go outside? At all? It’s this sort of nonsense that led to me spending three days in Chicago[2] in February, staring down gusts of arctic winds, and wondering what portion of Michigan Avenue could be traversed before I shuffled off the mortal coil, or at the very least acquiesced to wearing an unfashionable hat[3].

I blame much of my intolerance for cold on growing up in houses with unrelenting radiator heat—the kind that turns any environment into a low country bayou, and allows you to travel barefoot throughout the house with all the windows open in the middle of January. When I was a kid, I remember holidays in which my father would stoke the obligatory fire, and we’d all sit by the hearth sweating profusely in velvet dresses and taffeta skirts singing carols and trying to pretend that the magic of Christmas would ward off heat stroke until Silent Night could be sung in English, German, Latin, and Spanish.[4]

Also, there’s the genetic angle: I have to believe, many years ago, my ancestors crossed the Atlantic and settled in Virginia for a reason. That winters in the North Atlantic were cold and gray and dreary and summers were, well, pretty much the same thing. New England probably sounded fairly uninviting. Shitty winters and Puritans? You jest. Why not go south, where you might get malaria, but probably won’t be burned at the stake? Added bonus: pirates! And while I’m slightly disappointed no one considered the benefits for posterity by settling in, say, the Caribbean[5], I’m extremely happy that I don’t need snow tires.

None of this is to say I can’t appreciate the quality of certain winter days. I like walking around in cold weather, when the air is crisp and burns your lungs when you breathe too deeply. When the sky is high and clear and mostly cloudless. The best sunsets always happen in the winter, and a lot of things smell and taste and feel better. I don’t even mind the early darkness—I’m more productive at night anyway—but by that time, there’s little left to recommend the great outdoors, unless I’m drunk and have no option but to take my cigarette outside.

A few weeks ago, I had an opportunity to revisit the conditions of the ice storm when a failing furnace met with a failed gas valve to produce a heating emergency. I had to call the gas company to report a leak, which lead to big trucks with flashing lights and beeping meters not unlike those things in “Ghostbusters” and much excitement for three am on a weeknight. While the landlord sparred with the property manager over how best to remedy the situation, I spent two nights shivering under many blankets, and wondered why in hell anyone would ever want to visit Alaska.

Though finally fixed, sort of, the furnace hasn’t fully recovered, and continues to spar with the thermostat. I’ve taken to drinking rum. Wishful thinking.

Last night, my mother called to report a brief, yet heavy snow shower in my hometown, and we mused about the possibility of a White Christmas. I regret to say I was unable to drum up any real enthusiasm. It’s already cold—28 and falling—and I’m not much of a skier. I suspect my parents know the only reason I ever wished for snow was the promise of snow days. There’s a sort of special excitement to waking up at 7:00 on a cold morning and hearing a dj announce your school closure over the clock radio. A special bliss that accompanies turning off the alarm and sleeping until after your parents have left for work, thereby leaving you home to watch movie channels, play video games, and embark on some soon-to-be-abortive art project.

In high school, the snow day bliss was doubly gratifying. As a day student at a boarding school, the official call on whether roads were traversable was increasingly mine to make. My mother had a liberal philosophy with regards to school attendance, and I was friends with the five other day students who lived on my side of town. With a modicum of effort, it was possible to convince the Headmaster’s office that the flurry that had merely dusted the rooftop of the dining hall had left North Asheville roads nearly impassable. If the public schools were closed, we felt we had a rock solid case. And while our classmates attended Calculus, we Northside day students gathered at a pre-selected parentless house to smoke cigarettes, order Mexican take-out, and discuss which artist on Alternative Nation was the biggest poser, confident that the administration would continue to be utterly oblivious when it came to our attendance[6]

Of the myriad disappointments of my adult life, I’d have to rank loss of snow days in the top 100. They were, along with cute jackets and plentiful opportunities for tights, one of the few positive aspects of winter. Workplaces don’t close unless conditions are truly cataclysmic, and no friendly DJ is going to announce over the radio at 7:00 on a cold, dark, Monday morning that you don’t have to drive twenty-five miles down a congested artery, through commuter traffic to make it on time to the 8:45 meeting with a potential client that may, in fact, decide to hire his intern to do your job for $8/hr.

Likewise, when I think about White Christmas, I can only imagine the driving 200 miles west on the same clogged corridor, behind Southerners even less equipped than I to deal with inclement weather, and friends stuck in airport terminals, and the vaguely oppressive notion of being stuck indoors with my extended family in the suburbs for days at a time.

It’s not exactly the real life analogue to Irving Berlin’s musical postcard.

In the meantime, I’ll pray for sun, unseasonably warm temperatures, and lots of rum at my mother’s house.

Does Harry Belafonte have a Christmas album?

Just wondering.

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[1] My theory is that weathermen in North Carolina have a lot of time to kill between hurricane seasons, and therefore must invent ways to make people watch the local weather during the wintertime. Ironically, their cold weather hyperbole inevitable trumps hurricane coverage in style and delivery. As if to say, “A fifteen foot storm surge and continuous winds of 100+ miles an hour can be dangerous; a snow flurry, my friend—deadly.”

[2] One of the few American cities I don’t completely hate. Except for the cold thing.

[3] Winter hats are a commitment. Once you put it on, you’re pretty much stuck with it for the rest of the day, and unless it resembles something worn by one of the female leads in “Doctor Zhivago,” I’m not big on wearing winter hats as fashion accessories.

[4] We weren’t multi-lingual. It was a glorified parlor trick.

[5] Existing family members looking to correct this retroactively can consider a bequest to me of a small villa with excellent views and beach access available from December 1-March 1. I promise I’ll take excellent care of it, and ban all Jimmy Buffett on premises.

[6] And they were. When your total student body totals less than two hundred, it doesn’t seem like it would take much to notice that the students with the highest number of sick days were always sick on the same days. At my high school, you could be expelled for buying Cliff Notes, smoking a cigarette, or having sex. At public high school, I could have been forced to repeat a grade for having as many sick days as I racked up in one semester of senior year alone. Interesting trade-off.