Christmas Countdown: December 5 Winter Wonderland?

Here's the problem with Christmas: it falls in winter. Yeah, ok, I know, many Biblical scholars put the birth of Jesus Christ not necessarily on the December 25 but sometime in early winter and the Romans celebrated the winter solstice at this time so after a while Christmas came to be December 25, and that's the way it's been for the last eighteen centuries or so.

Well, Bah Humbug. Winter is messy. And do you know why it's messy? Because of snow, that's why. Snow, and sleet, and freezing rain and whatever the heck else falls out of the sky at this time year, yet does not keep your postal carrier from his or her appointed rounds.

Winter is messy and I do not like a mess. I can speak for all the garage-less among us when I say I do not like having to brush a few inches of snow off my car or scrape a layer of ice off the windshield. And people, no matter how long they've lived in an area where it snows, forget how
to drive in snowy weather. Add to these forgetful folks the holiday drivers (much like Sunday drivers, holidays drivers have such poor driving skills it must be that they only drive once a year at the holidays) and traffic becomes snarled, much like the snow covered branches pictured above.

What are my options? Moving to San Diego, where the average year-round temperature is 72 degrees? Hey, that's not a bad idea. Sure, there's the occasional wildfire that could possibly burn my house down, but still, no snow.

I suppose I could try to learn to live with the dark side of winter and try to find the bright side. Snow can be pretty. A stand of trees in the forest preserve after a snowfall, the stillness and quiet that surround you in the midst of that winter beauty, that's not so bad. Does it make up for scraping and brushing and shoveling and all that? Well, I don't know but I'm not packing for San Diego just yet.