Some thoughts on snow and Christmas ~ December 15, 1994

David Heiller

A friend called from Texas last Thursday, December, 8. She complained about the weather. It was 90 degrees, and everybody was suffering from the heat.

“Gee, that’s too bad,” I said. I didn’t mean it, and she knew that from my tone.

“What’s the weather like there?” she asked. I looked out the window. It was snowing hard. The wind was blowing too.

“Pretty nice,” I said. I meant that.

Things will even out for her. There will be days when it is 35 below zero here, and it will be 70 degrees there. She will get the last laugh.

But I wouldn’t trade our winter for Texas even if I was retired or independently wealthy or both.

We drove home through a nasty blizzard on November 29 this year. Twelve and a half hours from Chicago to Sturgeon Lake, through rain and sleet and ice and finally, close to home, a blizzard.

It was hard, and dangerous, and a few people thought we were foolhardy.

I don’t think so. That’s winter here. Sometimes you take chances with it. In a perverse way, that’s one of the things I like about winter.

We don’t face saber toothed tigers any more. Most of us don’t even climb mountains or shoot rapids. But by golly we can drive through a snowstorm.

When you take a chance and face adversity and win, it makes you stronger. That’s an old-fashioned idea, but that doesn’t make it any less true. You only have to read accounts from our forefathers who settled this country to know it’s true.

We have some old family pictures taken in about 1960. Our car is parked on the other side of the street. It is almost completely covered with snow. That’s where Mom had left it.

She had come home from Minneapolis on the train with my sister that day. When they got to LaCrosse, a snowstorm had hit.

It was 13 miles to home. The last seven miles she followed the tire tracks of a Brownsville man who had chains on. The highway was closed after they got home.

Noah outside the front window.

She got to Brownsville, then pulled over across from the house, left the car, and trudged in with Lynette.

You mark the passage of time with storms and experiences like that. I’ll always remember driving home through a blizzard on Thanksgiving eve, 1983. It was the day of my Grandma Heiller’s funeral. We made it, barely, and my wife and I still talk about it as the worst weather we’ve ever driven in.

And who can forget the Halloween blizzard of 1991, five days after the Twins won the World Series? Three feet of snow in one storm.

The first snow is hard. Breaking out winter coats, putting on boots. Finding the ice scraper under the car seat where you threw it last spring, and scraping ice off the windshield. Warming the car up in the morning before you get in. Hauling in firewood. Shoveling snow.

For a few minutes, you wonder why you put up with this.

Cross country skiing is one of the things that make 
us love winter, though in later years 
we became avid snowshoers.

But then something clicks, and you accept it, and even start to enjoy it.

You break out the skis or snowshoes or snowmobile. Throw an orange in the backpack, and sit on a log in the woods with your kids and wife and dog, and eat that orange. Man is it tasty! Your mouth waters just peeling it.

And there’s no feeling like early December, after the first snow, when the sun is shining and the house is bright with its soft light, and you know Christmas is just around the corner.

Christmas without snow just isn’t Christmas. It’s basic to our nature. Mom, apple pie, baseball, the Vikings, and a snowy Christmas.

I spent two Christmases away from snow in Morocco. I remember walking under the brightest moon I’d ever seen on Christmas Eve and thinking, “Jesus was born 1,977 years ago, about a thousand miles due east, and maybe a night like this.”

It was warm and dry and shepherds were watching their flocks up in the hills. Oh it, beautiful, and oh it was lonely. Partly I missed my friends and family, and partly I missed the woods and the river and ice skating and snow.

If there’s one problem with the Christmas story, and I did say if, it is that Jesus was born in the desert. He should have been born in Αskov or Willow River or Finlayson, or even Rutledge.

Not only should there have been no room in the inn, it should have been 20 below zero. That stable would have really been cozy, with ox and lamb blowing steam into the air like dairy barn at milking time.

And it should have been snowing outside, big white flakes that would float down like feathers.

Those of us who want to rewrite history, who love snow, will sing a different tune in about two months. We’ll wish for spring in February and know it is two months away. We’ll hit a few 40 below nights and remember why some of our friends do go to Texas and Arizona for the winter.

But that’s about the time those folks are thinking about heading home to Minnesota. Home, where it snows.