THERE’S NO BUSINESS LIKE SNOW BUSINESS!

PLASTICVILLE-USA

THERE’S NO BUSINESS LIKE SNOW BUSINESS!

I was born and raised in upstate New York so I am used to winter. In fact, I like winter. While I do not go skiing or snowshoeing or snowmobiling, I do like winter. I used to love to plow out my driveway and my neighbors driveways with my tractor and truck.

On the other hand, I do not like Florida. Unfortunately I now live there, and the chance of there being weather in the 30’s much less true winter weather is about as plausible as the thought that Obama will quit hating America one day. Essentially..no chance at all.

Sure a Florida beach can be a great place to spend a couple of weeks when it’s 5 degrees in Owego, NY and there’s 3 feet of snow on the ground, but outside of that, I find Florida to be pretty much useless.

When the Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s holidays roll around on the calendar living in Florida can be downright depressing. There’s no chance that you are going to see snow for Christmas, or even enjoy any sort of seasonable weather. This Christmas day it was 86 with a heat index of 95! Not exactly Kris Kringle weather.

Of course this holiday season while Florida was its usual hot self, the rest of the east coast was way beyond its normal parameters for Christmastime weather. During Christmas week in New York and Pennsylvania people were experiencing 70 degree weather. Wilkes-Barre Pennsylvania television station WNEP was reporting that people were celebrating Christmas on Harvey’s Lake by going boating. Usually this time of year Harvey’s Lake is frozen up or at least colder than Barak Obama’s heart.

The “Global Warming/Climate Change” nutballs are going crazy with the “see I told you so” whining. However, the weather has a much less sinister bend. According to the weather experts at the weekly agricultural newspaper Lancaster Farming, the current spate of unseasonable weather is due to a very strong El Nino weather pattern in the Pacific. It is also expected that the El Nino will collapse as we cross into 2016 and things will return to relatively normal in the near future. In fact as this is being written a great deal of the upper Midwest is experiencing blizzard conditions, and the northeast states are expecting snow and sleet later today and tomorrow.

However all this led me to wondering just how it was that snow became an irreplaceable part of Christmas? Virtually all of Christmas is tied in with snow, yet virtually half of the United States receives little snow, much less in December. Our Christmas songs are all tied into snow. Santa himself arrives in the snow on a sled from the north pole.

Certainly the Christ child for which Christmas is all about, was not born on a snowy night in Rutland, Vermont. He was born in the middle east which wouldn’t know snow from a sneaker. So snow has nothing to do with the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Today’s ever so sophisticated commercial marketing which does its best to destroy any and all of our cherished traditions immediately reverts to sappy snow-laden commercials when it is time to sell the latest techno gizz-whizz to Christmas shoppers. But why?

Whatever it is, those songs, pictures, old movies and stories all bring us back to a simpler time when at one point we’re all happy and polite and the ground around us is white. If we can’t physically experience it, we can at least recall it as Bing Crosby did in his monster hit record White Christmas. Merry Christmas to all!