No winter no cold no snow no holiday cheer
I’ve been checking my calendar for a couple of weeks now to make sure this is truly December the last month of the year and the Christmas holiday month that also marks the unofficial end of Fall and the beginning of Winter which is why I keep checking the calendar because so far Winter is a no show completely absent absolutely missing in action and this is not just an old guy whining about when he was young when there were real winters with deep snow and bitter cold and wind that froze your hair after taking a shower after high school basketball practice while walking home in the dark because this year isn’t even close to
Winter at all and if you want irrefutable evidence consider that it has been no problem wandering around town the past couple of weeks in nothing but a pair of pants and a nice long-sleeved shirt without a coat, jacket, fleece or even a sweater or a hat since that would completely overheat you in 60-degree weather with total sunshine beating down on our pointy little heads which are thinking we are sort of grateful that there is no need to even warm up the car in the morning because it’s downright balmy so you just hop in and fire the machine up and in about seven minutes you have to turn the heater off because you are baking which is confusing because it does get chilly at night when the sun goes down but that’s about it when it comes to this alleged Winter we are almost knee deep in already without the benefit of a good shot of Winter rain or a snowstorm that does anything more than put a powdered sugar dusting on the Sierra making our string of huge high mountain peaks look like sad little Christmas cookies some snotty kid has licked the frosting off of except in the hard to reach canyons and the same goes for Mammoth Mountain which is just chugging along with a makebelieve smile and marketing fib or two about great skiing on man-made snow which should make everyone a little nervous because this fake Winter could turn into the start of another a drought year when no one skis and also dumps a string of cash along 395 on the way to and from the big hill even though this is supposed to be an El Niño year but that isn’t happening yet and might not hit at all because the weather nerds always hide their wet cold snowy El Niño predictions behind cautious maybe-maybe-not escape clauses while cynics like me point to last year’s La Niña which was supposed to be dry as popcorn and turned out to be the wettest wildest year on record because the weather gods decided to trick us last year and they just might do the same this year which is sort of OK because its means the heating bills are a bit cheaper but a bone dry December without even a hint of snow makes the whole White Christmas fantasy a bit hard to keep going even when listening to dozens of versions of Rock Around the Christmas Tree or All I Want for Christmas Is You or Jingle Bell Rock or Little Drummer Boy or any other of the dozens of Christmas songs that are flooding all channels of traditional and social media for weeks in an effort to spread a little holiday cheer and all they do is remind us of a barren landscape of dead tumbleweeds and brown hills and leafless trees that look dead which is a look that can’t be countered by the sparkling Main Street Christmas decorations or the cheery home and business Christmas lights because there is no Christmas weather because there is no Winter and we don’t live in San Diego or Palm Springs we live in the Sierra for God’s sake where there is supposed to be Winter but not this year it seems so we’re going to have to muster up some Christmas spirit all by ourselves without the help of Christmas weather so good luck to us.
OPINION
(Jon Klusmire of Bishop is playing the cheery song Let It Snow Let It Snow Let It Snow on a continuous loop.)