Winter Wonderland

Hi! I'm Angela Benedetti, and I'm driving the bus today here at the blog. Everyone who comments today on one of my posts will get a raffle ticket -- max one per post -- and tomorrow I'll draw a name to get a $10 Torquere gift certificate. :)

I was born in San Francisco and grew up in Silicon Valley -- San Jose, Cupertino, Sunnyvale, that area. I remember when I was small, learning in school that winter was the season when it snowed. :/ Obviously it'd never been winter at my house, because I'd never seen snow except for TV and movies. (I was in my late thirties before I ever experienced actual snow, more than the once-every-dozen-years sprinkling on the valley floor that San Jose gets, which melts before 9am.) Back then, though, school books as well as other children's books, plus movies and TV shows and magazines and such all assumed that everyone lived in New England or the Midwest, and when you're five or six, this is really confusing. Common birds -- cardinals, orioles, chickadees...? I've still never seen any of those birds outside of photos or video. Children's magazines had craft projects for things like a suet ball covered in birdseed that would be hung from a (bare, leafless) tree as a bird feeder in winter when it was snowing. Snow again, and what's suet? And there are more of those cardinals in the picture! [bemused smile]

When I was in fifth grade, we were singing "White Christmas" for the school holiday show (which hints at how old I am) and our teacher found an intro that was perfect for our area:

The sun is shining, the grass is green,

The wind makes the trees all suede.

There's never been such a day

In beautiful San Jose.

But it's December the twenty-fourth,

And I am longing to be... up... north.... [go into song]

That was the first time I'd ever sung a Christmas song that specifically acknowledged that I did not live in a climate where deep snow and ice was the assumed backdrop for the holiday. It was pretty cool, and I've always liked that version of the song.

Nowadays there's a tiny bit of acknowledgement in media that some of us live in places where white Christmases are rare or nonexistent, which I assume results in fewer confused six-year-olds in the current generation of kids.

Does your area conform to the media norm when it comes to seasons? If so, does the picturesque view make up for the fact that everything's covered in frozen water? :) If not, what does Christmas look like to you? Do people in other warm climates put up Christmas trees with fake snow on them, while everyone's running around in T-shirts? And what did Christmas look like in kids' books when you were little?

Angie, who's going to bed now and will be back later