EVERY YEAR IT seems, right around Christmas, you folks down in Florida and Arizona start sending us Yoopers cute little Facebook postings or emails about the vast temperature differential between your home and ours.
Your not-so-subtle message is this: “Poor you, and lucky us! Hahahaha! We’ve got sun and you’re stuck with snow! We’re wearing short sleeves and you have to wear jackets and woolen hats!”
Well, here’s my Christmas wish for you this year. Don’t worry about us. We actually kind of like the snow and the cold–most of us, anyway.
Many of us would be bored silly waking up to 75 degrees every day in December, January, and February. Honestly.
The sameness. The tedium. The lack of a challenge (unless it’s deciding whether to wear sunblock or not).
And you know what? Some of us–again not all–actually enjoy shoveling snow. It’s invigorating and it’s a great workout (maybe even better than yours at your glitzy fitness gyms stuffed with beautiful, tanned bodies checking themselves in the mirrors every fifteen seconds).
And we sure as hell enjoy our brisk walks on our snow-covered streets and in our forests. And did you know we actually have downhill and cross-country skiing up here? Yeah, and the runs and trails are, like, ten minutes from our doorsteps.
Oh, did I mention the incomparable beauty of fresh-fallen snow clustering on the branches of pine trees? Or the majesty of Lake Superior waves crashing the shoreline in wintertime?
Or watching children, pink-cheeked and bundled up, gleefully rolling about in the snow? Or dogs joyfully romping through it?
Okay, okay, we’re not delusional. We know that driving in snow can be a pain. Driving behind a 15 mile-per-hour snow plow can really be a pain. And walking outside when the wind chill is minus twenty can really, really be painful if you aren’t wearing at least three layers. But that’s why God made saunas, right? And fireplaces. And steaming cups of coffee.
And, hell, a glass of wine or two. Or three.
Oh, one more thing. Golf. Yeah, yeah, we get it–lucky you, you get to play the game twelve months a year. Woohoo. Twelve fricking months. Every damn day if you choose. Three hundred sixty five days of chasing a little white ball around a big green lawn. Gawd. Shoot me now.
Sorry for the rant. This is not meant as a “Nanny nanny booboo! We’re better than youuuu!” letter. Not at all. In fact, most of us enjoy visiting you from time to time (especially when a frozen branch lands on our power line or our car plows into a snow bank or we bust our fricking tailbone falling on the driveway). I’m not kidding, you folks are great down there, your beaches and swimming pools are swell, your golf is….well, never mind.
The point is, we like where we live. We truly do not feel like we’ve been imprisoned in some Siberian gulag. Sometimes we gripe about the weather, of course, but everybody does. And we never have to complain about hurricanes, droughts, street crime, skyrocketing real estate prices, or the Zika virus.
So Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah and Happy New Year to all of you down there in the southern latitudes. And we’ll probably see you next month when it gets too fricking cold up here.
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