A Winter Wonderland Stroll Down Memory Lane - Editorial
The holiday season is in full swing all around us, but even with the joy and merriment, it feels like something is off this December, almost like the sparkle of the holiday spectacle has gotten a bit dimmer.
We are not the only ones who feel it; similar sentiments are popping up on social media and in daily conversations amongst northerners across the country.
Dare we say it? Alright, here it comes... we miss the snow. We are, much like lyricists of the 1930s and ‘40s, still dreaming of a “White Christmas,” nostalgic for the days when a “Winter Wonderland” was what we saw outside our windows, not just part of a song.
The winter weather of 2023 looks much different than it did 80 years ago, when Irving Berlin first dreamt of a “White Christmas.” And even then, the song was considered reminiscent, yearning for the Christmases of old as popularized by Charles Dickens in classics like “A Christmas Carol.”
It is hard to imagine living through anything resembling a Dickensian December when we are in the midst of an onset of winter so mild that the only precipitation we see is a deluge of rain. The idea of waking up to a light dusting of snow on a December morning seems out of reach today, when the average temperature hovers well above freezing. It is different.
It is sad to think that walking in a winter wonderland will, for most kids, be lyrics to a song rather than a real life experience. There is an inimitable novelty in waking to find your world freshly blanketed by an overnight snowfall. Nothing felt quite as euphoric as watching cable news early on a weekday morning, eyes trained on the banner scrolling across the bottom of the screen in search of the most coveted phrase in any student’s life: SNOW DAY.
Kids today may never know that joy. Snowfall in recent years has gradually decreased nationwide, and if the planet continues warming at the rate it is now, even recent history like New England’s 2015 “Snowmageddon” will feel as distant and unattainable as Dickens’s version of 19th-century London.
Perhaps it is not the snow itself that we miss—there is no doubting the inconvenience of a blizzard or the chore that is shoveling—but rather the idea of it and what it once meant. We may not have realized it then, but the snowy New England winters we once knew were subtle assurances that things were—at least as far as Mother Nature is concerned—going according to plan. All may not have been right in the world, but the cyclical nature of this region’s four distinct seasons was a subconscious comfort that, regardless of us, nature will carry on as usual.
The absence of all of this, in contrast, is impossible to not notice. Treetops no longer glisten, there is no snow to go dashing through, and the holidays are more likely to be wet than white. The lack of snow in this historically snowy region is all but a glaring reminder that the planet is, frankly, dying. It is hard to feel jolly with that on your mind.
Maybe, the thing we long for is not the snow at all; rather, we miss what it symbolized, and the sense of peace that came with it.