Mom and I were out shopping a few days ago when we stopped for lunch.  As we’d been driving around in the car we talked about things we missed from having Christmas up north.  One of the big ones was snow.  

In reality snow is not only a pain in the bottom to shovel but it’s dangerous when there’s a lot of it, or when it freezes, or the power goes out and you have electric heat…etc, etc. etc.   But I love snow.  I miss getting off school because of it, I miss the way it transforms the whole landscape, I miss throwing it at people.  Sledding, snowmen, snow angels.  All things I miss at this time of year.  (To be fair to Florida, though, I never saw a dolphin swim by four feet from the porch when we lived in Massachusetts.) 

As we pulled into the restaurant parking lot, still nostalgizing about the fluffy white stuff, little white spots began to brush against the windscreen of our car.  We were silent for a minute, watching the small flakes swirl around in the breeze.  We got out of the car and stood in the parking lot, watching the white dust rustle and twirl across the tarmac.  

It was obvious that it wasn’t snow because it was about 55 degrees outside at the time (it’s warmed up since.)  After much speculation we decided it was bits of styrofoam debris raining down from somewhere, possibly from one of the stores in the nearby strip mall.  Actually the stuff is probably a horrible environmental hazard and it will later turn out that we should have been wearing gas masks to protect our lungs from harmful particulates.  We laughed about this over lunch.  But it still put us in the Christmas spirit.

The house is currently full of the scent of pumpkin pie, baked by the only Christmas elf who keeps this blog.  The tree is decorated, Christmas cards adorn the tables, the Advent calendar is almost finished for the year, and soon we’ll be arranging the creche that my grandfather built.  Snow or no, it really feels like Christmas.