How to dress for weather: From Halloween through Christmas
For most of human history, no one knew what the temperature was. Early on, humans had to resort to “Ugh” for warm, “UghUgh” for hot and “Argh” for cold. These terms evolved to “freezing,” “balmy,” “blistering” and “hotter than a pepper sprout.” Finally, in the early 17oos, a gentleman by the name of Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit saved us from thinking about weather in such literary terms and we grew precise: 93 degrees (hot), 14 degrees (cold).
Once we had attained such precision, it was only natu- ral to start tracking weather and comparing one year with the next and pondering the meaning of it all.
In that tradition, let’s consider the Northwest Geor- gia holiday season weather patterns of the last decade.
Halloween falls reliably on Oct. 31 year after year. What is decidedly not reliable about it is the temperature. Last year, we saw a warm 86 degrees on pumpkin day — a disappointment to many, but also an anomaly of the past 10 years. For the nine years prior to that, trick-ortreaters enjoyed highs in the 60s five years, in the mid70s three years and a high of 59 in 2014. For pranksters, who prefer the cover of night, lows ranged from 34 to 60, never reaching the freezing point and frosting their soapy windows or slippery fingers.
How about Thanksgiving? Surely, we should be able to enjoy consistently cool weather then. For the extremely precise individual, Thanksgiving comparisons may be suspect since the hol- iday falls all over the end of the month, ranging from the 22nd to the 28th during our time period. But a holiday is a holiday and we won’t veer from our model over trifles.
The good news about turkey day is that it hasn’t reached the 80s in 10 years. On the other hand, it hasn’t been any more regular than Halloween. Highs have run from 45 to 74 and lows from 21 to 58.
Finally, we come to December. We’ll use Christmas, which falls like clockwork on the 25th, as our marker holiday. Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas” was not written with the south in mind, but he was born in Russia where there is always snow for Christmas, so we’ll forgive him. Here in Northwest Georgia, we have not seen daytime highs that would sustain snow in ten years. We came close last year with a high of 37.
We’ve had two Christmases in the last ten years when Santa had to change to his Bermuda shorts, with highs in the 70s. Five years the high was in the 40s and three years it was in the 50s. Even at night, the temperature dropped low enough to invite a little snow only four times. The snow nevertheless declined.
Conclusion: Keep your year-around clothes out year around.