By the Way Don’t Let it Snow! Don’t Let it Snow! Don’t Let it Snow! December 2006

by Dan Shafer

“Snow” is a four-letter word. That, in and of itself, ought to be sufficient justification for my otherwise inexplicably strong feelings against its occurrence in my life. You’d think I’d be over it by now. I haven’t had to live where it snowed for several decades now. Still, the cold, flaky white stuff plagues my dreams and remains a constant thought in my life.

“I will never,” I am prone to say without the slightest provocation, “live anywhere they have a word for that stuff!” On other occasions, when the weather forecast calls for chilly, wet weather, and one of my hapless and previously uninitiated acquaintances happens to be in the neighborhood, I might be heard to threaten, “If it ever snows in Monterey, we’ll be moved south 300 miles before the first snowflake can melt!”

I probably don’t mean that. It might take a day or two longer than I think.

Every year, sponsors of one or two local events truck in the white stuff. I guess I’ll allow that as long as we get enough advance notice that I don’t accidentally end up actually being able to look at it, let alone touch it.

My aversion to snow comes from spending the first half of my life in Michigan, followed by a few years in Utah. Snow falls aplenty in both of those places, I assure you. When I lived in Michigan, I worked on a daily newspaper as a reporter-editor. I remember one February day in central Michigan. We had published a weather forecast in the previous afternoon’s edition predicting partly cloudy weather.

Overnight, it snowed. And snowed. And snowed. I was on early news desk duty at the paper when the phone rang about 7:15 a.m. I answered it and a booming voice on the other end of the line shouted, “I just shoveled 14 inches of your partly cloudy out of my blankety-blank driveway.” I knew that, of course, since I’d had to do the same thing as well as unfreeze the lock on my car door before I could get to work, a trip made life-threatening by a sheen of 1/2 inch of “black ice” on the only road to town.

I figure I’ve paid my snow dues over the years. I hope never to see it again except from a respectable distance. Something like 30 miles sounds about right. From that vantage point, a “dusting” of snow (which is really not a dusting if you’re in the dust) has a certain beauty and charm. As long as I don’t think too hard about it.

So why am I writing about snow if I live in a place where it seldom ever appears? Because this is the time of year when snow used to mark the arrival of my favorite holiday season. No, not Christmas, down to which we are all obsessively and obscenely counting the days as you read this. My favorite holiday has just passed. For my money, nothing can compete with Thanksgiving.

Why? Let me count the ways.

First, there’s turkey. I could (and often do) eat turkey several times a week. I love the stuff. On Thanksgiving, I end up eating turkey in prodigious quantities several times and (here’s the best part) nobody yells at me! No, it’s expected behavior!

Second, there’s pumpkin pie. If anything is better than turkey, it’s pumpkin pie. My oldest daughter Sheila makes a pumpkin pie in which she substitutes eggnog for evaporated milk in the recipe. I could (and often do) eat several pieces of that wonderful stuff per day all through the holiday season.

Third, Thanksgiving is the only guaranteed four-day weekend of the entire year. How great is that? The Congress in its infinite...whatever...can jury-rig the dates for holidays that used to be predictable by their actual date but which now occur on Mondays regardless of the actual date being commemorated. But they don’t mess with Thanksgiving. And almost everyone gets the Friday after Thanksgiving as a holiday. I work for myself and even I give my employee the four days off.

Last but not least, and sadly, this is the only day every year when almost everyone takes time to ponder the things about which they feel gratitude. Even in the worst of times, it seems to me that we can find something every day for which to be thankful to God or Spirit or Heaven or the angels or whomever you count as the source of your beneficence. So it’s nice that at least once a year we stop and think about those things. It brings a warm glow to my heart.

Unless that’s just my stomach searching for the next piece of pumpkin pie.

BY THE WAY… One of the things I expressed gratitude for this Thanksgiving was you, dear reader, for taking time to read, enjoy and share this magazine. Merry Christmas! °

Dan Shafer
Associate Editor
dan@65mag.com