It looks like Christmas this year will be just like the ones I used to know–bitterly cold with a ton of snow. The Storm Team Five forecast for the holiday weekend calls for accumulation of a couple of inches the next few days, followed by below zero temps Christmas Eve and a high Christmas Day of just five.
For those of us in our forties and fifties, that was the holiday forecast almost every year when we were kids. My family was Christmas Eve mass attendees. So that meant bundling up and venturing out into the below zero temps in the dark to park far away from the church and trundle in through the piles of snow because we already had two feet of it by the end of December. And then to sit in the back so that every time someone came in the door, the frigid wind would blow on you again. Then when you’d finally would warm up–mass was over and it was time to trudge back through the snow to a freezing cold car for the ride home.
Christmas morning, even if you got a cool winter toy to play with, you couldn’t head right outside and put it to use, because the wind chill was so low that you could only be in the elements for a few minutes without risking frostbite. Keep in mind this was before Under Armor Cold Gear and Goretex that came in kids sizes. Then it was into the freezing car again to drive to Grandma and Grandpa’s house for lunch. Then back to the freezing cold car to head to the other grandparent’s house for dinner–before surviving the freezing cold ride home again.
When I was a kid I was almost always sick right before Christmas. I used to think that it was due to anxiety that because I had misbehaved so much during the year that I was not going to get any gifts. But now I realize that is was more likely due to the brutal cold that came early and just lingered.
The winters of the 1970’s and early 80’s were brutal. Long stretches of below zero temps. Lake Michigan almost completely froze over one year. Some of the largest blizzards to ever hit the area all roared through in the late 1970’s. It was so ugly that Time magazine had a cover story about scientist’s concerns about the start of the next ice age. And who could blame them? Because when you looked at the short term data from the ugly winters of the 1960’s to the early 80’s there was definitely a trend heading in the wrong direction.
And that’s why whenever I hear a climate change alarmist calling for us to “reverse the effects of global warming” I look at them like they are insane. I have to remind myself that they are too young to remember the Christmases of my youth–and just how miserable they were–and how we wished that going “over the river and through the woods” didn’t involve taking your life in your own hands.
