I’M DREAMING OF A WHITE CHRISTMAS
Just not here!
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Thank you for your comments on my previous post—BROWN GIRL IN THE… DELUGE? I loved having you share your stories dealing with the issue of belonging and identity. That space in-between seems less lonely now, knowing how many inhabit it, how many relate.
And now to this week’s post.
It seems, about two-thirds of the world’s population, including a good proportion of Americans, have never seen snow. That certainly was true for me as a child in India—a fact much bemoaned by my American mother, though I’m not sure why. Despite having grown up in Michigan, Canada, and Sweden, she detested the cold.
One of my mother’s childhood stories had to do with the two-mile walk to and from school, a trip she took with her sister every day when she was about ten and homesteading with her parents in Ontario, Canada, after the Great Depression. In winter, that meant plodding through several feet of miserable, damp, freezing, nasty snow. On one of those days, her sister lay down and told my mother to leave her there because she was too tired to even consider taking another step. She needed a bit of a nap, she said, and would come home later, on her own.
Now, my savvy mother, despite being four years younger, knew all about hypothermia and what would happen to her exhausted sister if she were left there. And given my mother was nothing if not stubborn, her insistent nagging did succeed in pushing her sister into taking one more step, and another, until they were safely home. (Clearly, that was before the sled and the husky!)
So, you shouldn’t be surprised if the thought of snow didn’t exactly fill me with warmth at Christmastime in India, when cards from family and friends in the US flooded our mailbox. Cards, whose common theme was snow. Blankets of it. Which seemed such a misnomer for something neither cozy nor warm. My father would string these picturesque odes to winter like streamers around the house as part of our Christmas decorations. And the snow was exactly where I wanted it—beautifully far away, encapsulated in photographs of exotic distant climes, incapable of reaching its frosty fingers out to bite me.
One of my father’s snow-stories came from the years he spent working on his doctorate as a graduate student at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY, where winters were nothing if not bitter and snow-bound.
He told of steep slopes in gorge-ridden Ithaca, and roads that turned icy and slick. And of how people would leave their trash cans on the curb on pick-up day despite the conditions. None of the tall plastic bins on wheels we are used to now. These were the aluminum cans of dated cartoons, with detachable lids. Aluminum that skates across ice at the slightest provocation, and protests clatteringly when it does.
And my father loved to tell of the day he snuck out at dawn to retrieve his illegally parked car, before the school traffic police discovered it and ticketed him, only to skid on said ice in his efforts to tiptoe across it. Unable to stop himself, he crashed into a whole line of trash cans, and watched, frozen in horror from where his non-ice-accustomed legs had landed him on his behind.
The cans toppled like dominoes, shattering the early morning calm with a colossal clamoring of their lusty metallic lungs. They perfumed the air in glee as they littered the white slopes with colorful entrails they disgorged, tumbling all the way to the bottom of the hill.
So much for an unnoticed getaway. I imagine my father wished he could roll down the hill after them and disappear in a snowdrift.
Despite all this, when my family took a trip to the northern state of Kashmir, and trekked up mountains on horseback, to camp at popular tourist destinations Pahalgam and Kilenmarg, my mother’s excitement was off the charts at the potential to treat her deprived (all my nine years) children to snow. It was a total about-turn. Now, she was in raptures, extolling the enchantment of the miserable, damp, nasty, freezing stuff that had nearly killed her sister. Such is the troubling power of nostalgia.
Even though it was summer, up here in the mountains of Kashmir, there was snow. Not around us. Not even near us. But visible from our campsite. And my mother was determined to find some in walking distance.
She did—hidden from the sun, in a northward gulch, a long patch of very packed, very brown snow. Like those archaeologists with the uncanny ability to distinguish fossils from mere stones, she was the only one who could even recognize the patch as having once been snow.
My brother and I tried so hard to show our enthusiasm, as my mother explained that in its current condition it was nothing like real snow. Real snow was fluffy not packed hard, not brown and dirty. That once upon a time, several months earlier, this sad piece of ice had formed in the sky as delicate flakes, intricately and uniquely patterned, and had descended in mystical silence to conceal any imperfections in the countryside with its blinding whiteness…
Little did she know then, as she extolled the virtues of a snow bleached clean by the nostalgia of her childhood, that both her children would grow very familiar with yellow snow. And brown snow. And black snow. And slushy, mud-puddle snow. And icy sidewalks that considered it beyond hilarious to smack the frozen behinds of unwary traversers while some shop loudspeaker belted out, I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas, above their heads.
Well, after two years in Kentucky, where I experienced my first snow ever, thanks to a funny roommate who thought it was hilarious to wake me up at 5 am to fake me into thinking it was actually snowing…
and another who would share many snowy memories with me,
seven years in the Mid West,
and ten in Boston,
I’m done with the stuff. I no longer even feign excitement.
I know, I know. I sound a bit, OK, maybe a lot, like that old curmudgeon Scrooge who had nary a jolly Christmas bone about him. Bah, humbug, and all that jazz.
But here’s the thing. I love Christmas. It’s just the expectation of, or yearning for, the snow-whiteness of it that leaves me cold. And, interestingly, I just read a USA Today article that claims, “the majority of Americans live where it never snows at Christmas.”
Huh. So, why are we seemingly obsessed with the stuff at this time of year?
Blame it on that old curmudgeon, Scrooge! Apparently, way back in 1867, around Christmastime, Charles Dickens toured the US to read from The Christmas Carol about a London romantically draped in snow. Mass publications simultaneously popularized snowy images with more such stories, and voilà, the romance of snow and Christmas was born, and the two would remain married to this day. I’d say that’s an overlong time to stay together, since the very first Christmas wasn’t white. Maybe, given the warming nature of our planet, the relationship will strain.
Or maybe, the nostalgia for a whiter Christmas will only grow as the potential for it diminishes…
As for me, I’m lucky to live in a part of the country where, once again, the snow is exactly where I want it—beautifully far away, high on the surrounding mountain tops,
incapable of reaching its frosty fingers down to bite me where I nestle in my valley, singing carols, surrounded by orange groves
and palm trees.
And shamelessly, I’d love a White Christmas, as long as that fluffy, blindingly white snow of my mother’s nostalgia stays up there, blanketing those far away mountaintops in the Christmas Card perfection of my childhood.
Have a wonderful Holiday Season! May you have snow if you want it… but not if you don’t.
Don't know how I missed this. I hope you had a great Christmas and happy New Year in advance. I loved your post. Your photo had me longing for my old home in Hemet. I used to love to be encircled by the San Jacinto and San Bernardino mountains when they were capped with snow. Albeit, we get snow here in Texas, which surprised the heckle out of me when the first winter after I moved here.
Growing up in India, I absolutely loved my rare snow experiences, from toy train rides to Shimla to motorcycle adventures on snowy mountain roads. As a graduate student in the Midwest, I fondly recall skipping classes to enjoy the season’s first snow. However, now I face a condition where my hands and feet freeze in the cold, making winter less enjoyable despite the cherished memories.