Christmas Memories - The Snow

I am an old fashioned kind of guy. My ultimate Christmas dream would be that the whole family arrives for the days festivities and then the snow starts – or really starts to come down.

We have a huge stockpile of wood in the living room and the fire is roaring. There’s talking, laughing and maybe even singing at the piano. There’d be a lot of hot chocolate, cookies, great food and lots of treats.

There’d be a mandatory pick-up game of snow-football, or at least a huge snowball fight, with a time of warming up in front of the roaring fire with the whole family.

I guess that all I’m saying is that it doesn’t seem like Christmas without snow. Where I grew up there was a definite lack of snow. I probably remember only a half a dozen that had any measurable snow at all. The Seattle area is great for a lot of reasons, but having lots of snow is not one of those things. I now live in Eastern Washington and we have a lot of snow here… definitely more white Christmas’s than not – and we get some good cold single digit weather, too. Really makes it feel like Christmas! Here's some pics from my place last Christmas

So – as Christmas is fast approaching, do you get to have a white one? Or –did you have some great white Christmas’s growing up?

The Snow of '68

We have our first prediction of snow in the next couple of days. I do enjoy the snow, and that’s largely because I grew up in Seattle where we didn’t have much of it. There were a couple of good snow storms when I grew up, but they were the exception, not the rule.

I do remember that we had a big storm in ’68. This happened to coincide with when my folks decided to do an addition to our home. We had the dining room addition foundation poured, walls and roof framed, and the contractor had just opened up the wall between our kitchen and the new dining room when the storm hit. And it was a big one – dumped 3 feet of snow in a short amount of time. You guessed it – we ended up with snow in our kitchen. My mom wasn’t too happy, but we did get a good story out of the experience, though.

It did make for good sledding, though, which was a rarity in our area. Living above the Puget Sound we had some good hills. So – with the big snow – we all got some great nights of sledding fun. We rode a route that started right by our house and, if you did it right, could take you all the way to the beach. The normal stopping place was about half the way down. The funnest thing I remember was that one of our neighbors had a big black lab named Tucker. They’d keep him at the midpoint until a bunch of us piled there, and we’d all rope our sleds together and he’d haul them all up the hill for us. It was one of the coolest things to us as kids.

We get a lot of snow here in Pullman where I live now, but my funnest memories are of the few times we had big snow where I grew up.