Oh, the weather outside is frightful.
I wore a skirt to work today, without tights. My poor colleagues were forced to deal with my pale, pasty legs, but I couldn’t help it. It was nearly fifty degrees in December in Vermont, and this girl needed to make the most of the sun during the ugly season.
This New England December resembles a Pacific Northwest April. It’s been balmy, warm, and windy. I spent Sunday in a t-shirt, hiking in the woods with my dog, avoiding ticks rather than icicles. My neighbor pulled a carrot, an edible, bright orange carrot, from his garden this week. And our poor local ski area remains closed…and muddy.
And yet, Christmas, is less than ten days away. The forecast for Christmas day in my hometown of Norwich, Vermont is 50 degrees and rainy. Everyone dreams of snow in Vermont on Christmas morning, and yet, we’ll probably be sitting on the back porch, wondering what to do with our shiny new toboggans in all this mud.
People have all sorts of opinions about what’s causing these weather shifts. All I know is that I hope brown Christmases in Vermont don’t become the norm. In my heart, I’m dreaming of a white Christmas. But it seems Mother Nature has other plans.
So, I’m planning on making the most of this brown Christmas. I’m hoping that someday we’ll remember the Christmas of ’15 when we played football in shorts in the backyard. Perhaps we’ll laugh about eating Grandma Susie’s apple pie on the porch. Hopefully, the tiny tots will someday become nostalgic for the Christmas when Uncle Norm opened up his swimming pool for one more plunge. We’ll do the best with what we have. We’ll hold each other tightly. We’ll be kind to Mother Nature. And we’ll be a little more thankful for those past white Christmases, just like the ones Bing used to know.
And hopefully, next year, and the following year, and the year after that…our beloved white Christmases will return. Hopefully, brown, muddy, balmy Christmases don’t become the backdrop for Vermont holiday movies. But for now, this brown Christmas will still hold magic…even in flip flops.
