If there is one city that says "Christmas," it's New York City. I was fortunate to grow up there and to experience the magic and splendor of the Big Apple during the holidays: The Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree, The Radio City Christmas show complete with the Rockettes, the beautiful ice skating rink, and 5th Avenue decked out like a spectacular light show from one end to the other, with St. Patrick's Cathedral ringing it's bells as horse-drawn carriages deposited people at its steps. Yes, indeed, New York City was, and is, the place to be if you want to really experience a magical Christmas ... unless you want a white Christmas. As a child, I would have traded in all the lights and the Rockettes as well for a really good, authentic, white Christmas.
Long before the days of climate change and global warming, the New York City area didn't see a great deal of snow in December, if we saw any at all. Every year I would wish and pray to wake up Christmas morning to see my neighborhood in Queens decked out like the country Christmas movies I saw on TV. Alas, the most we ever got was a dusting, and that would usually be gone by dinner time. One year when I was about 8 years old, I prayed my heart out for snow. It was Christmas Eve and I was up in my parents' bedroom on my knees, looking out their window into the early evening darkness to watch for my father's car coming home from his work. Looking at all the colored lights on the neighbors' houses did nothing to lift my spirits. I wanted snow. I wanted to go outside on Christmas Day and build a snowman, make snow angels, and catch snowflakes on on my tongue. I finally saw my father's car come down the street and pull in to park. As I was about to get up, I caught something out of the corner of my eye. Could it be? Was I really seeing ... snow flurries? Oh, joy, my prayers were being answered. By the time I woke up tomorrow, it would be a real Christmas wonderland. Alas, the next morning when I woke up, the dusting barely covered the tops of the cars and the sidewalks, and, as usual, was gone by dinner time.
It was 43 years later when I experienced my first, real, white country Christmas. I has moved upstate in March and after a lovely summer, and a thoroughly beautiful autumn, the likes of which I'd never seen, I was assured by my new neighbors that a white Christmas was a sure thing. In fact, it wasn't unusual to see snow for Thanksgiving, or even before (in fact, in 1994, we had snow for Halloween). That first Christmas morning I woke to brilliant sunshine glittering off the white blanket of snow, decorating the ends of the pine trees outside my windows, and reflecting off the surface of the ice blue water of the river below. If I'd had a camera at that moment, I would have run outside in my pj's and snapped a picture to preserve that scene forever.
It has been 29 Christmases since that first, magical one, and at the age of 72 I still pray for a white Christmas. I've never really understood why I was so obsessed with the idea of snow for Christmas unless it was because my childish brain associated it with Santa Claus and the North Pole, or, as I got older, the picture in my heart of a simple, authentic, country Christmas. Whatever the reason, I don't think I could live in Florida, or Hawaii, or anywhere warm where there were palm trees instead of pine trees, and I know for certain that I couldn't live anywhere that the chance of a white Christmas wasn't almost a shoe-in. All I know is that on a snowy Christmas Eve, I swear I can hear the prayers of all the children in the world in that silence that only a snow-covered Christmas Eve can bring, when the world stands still for just one night and love lives there in every snowflake.
May you all have a wonderful holiday filled with love, laughter, family, friends, and, if you're lucky, even a little snow.
And so it is.
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