Make It Snow

Once. In Colorado Springs, famous for its proximity to towering “fourteener” peaks and the crisp linen folds of ski slopes, it has snowed precisely once so far this winter. I think it’s just to spite me. 

I don’t remember how old I was the first time I saw White Christmas. I’m not sure I grasped the central message of the film—that people need each other, even if our attempts at love and help are often half-baked and harebrained. It made perfect sense to me, however, that a snowless Christmas is a catastrophe whether your livelihood is dependent on successfully running a ski lodge or not. 

Probably as a result of countless rewatches of A Charlie Brown Christmas, Rudolph, and How the Grinch Stole Christmas, I absorbed the belief that a winter wonderland was essential to Christmas. (In fact, with the exception of The Nativity, I cannot think of a Christmas movie in which snow does not feature.) 

In the weeks between Thanksgiving and December 25, I would anxiously watch the night sky for the faint rose and amber hues that meant the city streetlights were reflecting off of clouds heavy with ice. Every morning, I would race to the window to check the front yard. 

Winter weather in Colorado is unpredictable. I remember shivering in the family minivan on the way home from rehearsal for A Christmas Carol and seeing the outside temperature reading at negative double digits. But one of my family’s Christmas traditions is to take a sunny hike mid-afternoon on Christmas Day and come home to the smell of roast in the crockpot. I’ve probably had more sunny Christmases than white ones. And yet, as a kid, it never really felt like Christmas without snow. 

I wanted the ecstatic thrill of blinking awake under a drift of covers to silence. You feel the silence first, then you see the light. Fresh snow in Colorado glimmers and glows crystalline and celestial under a cathedral dome of cerulean sky. The lilac bushes in my backyard would stoop heavy under ermine cloaks, creating bowers where a child could sit hidden and watch the squirrels bound away on secret missions. If it snowed enough, we could take the mint-green sled to the rocky hillside down the street and coast down, dodging the alien spikes of yucca. The sun would make the snow pack slick. Faster. Faster. FASTER. Until we had to abandon ship before colliding with a neighbor’s fence. 

At home, we’d kick off our snow pants and boots and vie for a place standing on the heater vents in the living room, aching toes tingling back to life. 

Snow had magic in it. It was part of the perfect Christmas, an essential part. But one that I could not make happen. A tradition over which my power didn’t reach. 

Tradition and magic have a peculiar relationship. Ritual can create the conditions—the door—for magic to occur. Like the freezing temperatures that crystallize water into the impossible, invisible, infinity of varied beauty that is snow. A Christmas Eve candle, gripped in a child’s hand as the flames dance to the breathy lyrics of “Silent Night” is much the same. The tradition, the ritual, the liturgy, they are not the magic—or the Divine—they are the invitation. 

However well and earnestly you do the ritual, you cannot make the magic happen. And the harder you try, the more it slips through your fingers, like pinching snowflakes.  

But oh, how I have tried. I painstakingly construct every Christmas through ritual and tradition, filling my December calendar with opportunities for the magic to occur. This year will be perfect. I plan, host, give, and contrive. This will feel like Christmas.

Yet, I know you cannot manufacture magic, memory, revelation, or incarnation. I scoff at the ski resorts that pump manufactured snow onto the slopes to fill in their bottom line. Surely, the costly operation simply doesn’t feel the same. 

Traditions exist to help us; they put poetic form on the bare branches of belief. But we cannot pull in or push around the Mystery and the Magic by sheer force of will. That is the whole point. The Gift must come to us. 

When my boyfriend tells me that he didn’t grow up with many holiday traditions and would like to have some, I know I am just the person for the job. 

I invent a tradition—a celebration of the first snow. All through November, I check the forecast every day, looking for the little snowflake icon, prepared to accept a prediction of “wintry-mix.” Anticipation builds like barometric pressure, which ironically fails to cooperate and produce snow. Mid-November, I tell my boyfriend to look forward to the first snow but withhold the details. Anticipation is half the fun. All the best wonders are preceded by prophecy. 

But November remains temperate. Then, on the very last day of the month, it happens. 

“I can smell it,” I say as we drag a Christmas tree up the stairs to my apartment. “It’s going to snow.” 

But Jack Frost is a sneaky, contrary little stinker and it snows—really snows! Currier-and-Ives-style—right as I am headed out of town on a business trip. My new tradition must be delayed. 

It hasn’t snowed again. The phenomenon is being discussed at length around every water cooler, check-out lane, and drive-through window in the city. 

So, eventually, I say, “Let’s do it anyway. Maybe we can ritually summon the snow.” 

I present a gift of cozy, flake-festooned pj pants. My boyfriend and I whip up a cloud of homemade marshmallow and drift it into a pan to sit overnight. 

I suppose we shall wait and see. But I see something sparkling in blue-sky eyes. I’m hopeful.