Shawn Vestal: Dreaming of a white Christmas? Dream on

I was asked this week – swear to God – how I’m liking all this winter.

It’s not nice to laugh at people, you know, but still. Winter? This isn’t winter. This is the season of blah. The hours of blargh. The gray days of meh.

It’s the bleakest: icy rags of snow clinging to the gutters and lawns. Dirty little patches of slowly dying crystals. Everything wet, everything gray, everything middling.

With one week until Christmas, what I want right now – and I and the tribe of winter lovers, those of us born and raised and indoctrinated on the cold realities and misty mythologies of hard-core winter – is some dang snow.

No more of this dreary Seattle slosh. A real Rocky Mountain winter. Red noses and cracked fingertips. Icicles and snow berms. Gusts of silvery air bursting forth from every breathing creature. Snow everywhere.

What the forecast says, though, is: dream on.

It is supposed to snow tonight, actually. An 80% chance of snowfall, between 1 and 3 inches. But then over the next two days comes the “pineapple express” – warmer temps and rainfall, primed to wash away any lingering snow, said Kris Crocker, the longtime weather guru for KXLY News.

“I can’t imagine there will be a flake of snow after this weekend,” she said.

And as for Christmas Day?

“Just this morning I got a hint of maybe a little tiny bit of snow Christmas morning,” she said Tuesday. “There’s a glimmer of Christmas hope. I don’t know if it will be enough to scratch your Christmas itch, but there will be a little.”

Crocker – a native of eastern Idaho who is also a big fan of winter, both personally and professionally – knows that for most of us the itch is more stubborn than that. We dream of mounds of snow, glittering white. Snowball fights and snowmen. All that stuff. She does, too.

What Crocker also understands is that the power of our memories and impressions about white Christmas, and about our sense that we usually get one, are stronger than the facts. In truth, only 57% of the time over the past three decades has there been an inch or more of snow on the ground at the airport on Christmas Day, she said.

“I think it’s because we associate Christmas so much with snow and remember so fondly the activities we have in the snow, the thought of not having a white Christmas is outrageous,” she said. “But it happens quite frequently.”

Last year, there was an inch on the ground at the airport. There were 5 inches in 2016, and 11 – nice! – in 2015.

In 2014, there was none.

Which is how some people, misguided as they are, like it. Lots of us like a real winter, and lots of us don’t. For a certain number of people among us – let’s call them the winter whiners – any amount is too much.

Any cold is too cold. Any ice is too icy.

And any snow is far, far too much snow.

As we saw briefly last week, 2 inches of snow can be too much for some folks – people who can’t drive in it, people who slam on their brakes on icy roads or gun the engine when their wheels are spinning, people shivering in their light jackets or furiously rubbing their gloveless hands together, people who are simply not up to the job that winter gives us.

That kind of weather incompetence makes the rest of us – the winter lovers – comfortably smug. That’s a big part of loving winter, frankly. Knowing how to manage it, and feeling self-righteous about that knowledge. Having the right stuff, and feeling smart about having it. The right boots and proper tools and the know-how about how to apply the brakes or how to walk on ice. How to rock the car out of a snowbank when you’re stuck. When to put down the de-icer and when not to.

Crocker said it makes her feel tough to understand and enjoy winter, and I know what she means. There are a lot of pleasures of competency built into knowing how to appreciate the season.

It doesn’t seem like we’ll be getting any of those pleasures, at least not through Christmas. The jet stream is simply pushing the storms that might otherwise bring us snow to the south. As Crocker puts it, “If we’re not getting snow, someone else is getting our snow.”

So Merry Christmas, you happy elsewheres. Here’s hoping our snow comes back to us sometime soon.