Merry Cold Christmas

Last night, my wife said, “Is this going to qualify as a White Christmas?”

“Well,” I said, thinking about it. “We didn’t get much snow, so it is not a pretty blanket of snow. With the sky overcast, it looks pretty desolate. Still, though, I guess it would indeed qualify as a White Christmas. It will be your first one.”

She is a Texan and she doesn’t mince words.

“Sure not what it’s cracked up to be,” she said.

She had never had snow on Christmas. In fact, growing up in Houston, she rarely saw snow at all.

I asked her, “Do the radio stations play songs like ‘Jingle Bells’ and ‘Walking in a Winter Wonderland’ down there? Does Bing sing ‘I’m dreaming of a White Christmas” on Houston radio?

“Well, of course,” she said. “It snows in some places in Texas.”

She told me how when she was a kid, her mom and dad would pack the family up and drive north of Houston some 50 miles to Cut and Shoot whenever there was a little bit of snow at Uncle Bubba’s and Aunt Sissy’s place.

“It’s a little farther north, so they would get snow, a little, when we didn’t,” she said.

I remember a few years ago when her niece emailed some pictures of her kids’ snowman in Austin. A closer look at the snowman showed that it was next to a child’s sand bucket. It was a cute little miniature snowman made from snow that the kids had scraped off cars and scooped off the ground with the bucket. They had managed to get enough snow to make a little snow feller, though.

My wife wants to move back down to that warm place.

I don’t blame her.

God bless America, God bless Dixie and Merry Christmas to all our readers here in the Heartland and across this great nation.

Weather data

Here is the Rolla weather data for the 24-hour period ending at 7:30 a.m. today, Dec. 25, 2017, Christmas Day:

High temperature: 28 degrees F.

Low temperature: 17 degrees F.

Current temperature: 19 degrees F.

Precipitation: 0.01 inch.

Precipitation for the year: 42.87 inches

Precipitation for the month: 1.01 inch

Snowfall/frozen precipitation: 0.2 inch.

Snowfall/frozen precipitation for the 2017-2018 season: 1.9 inches

Snowfall/frozen precipitation for the year: 4.5 inches.

Snowfall/frozen precipitation for the month: 1.9 inches.

Relative humidity: 86 percent.

These figures are courtesy of S.R. Fraley, National Weather Service cooperative observer up on the campus of the Missouri University of Science & Technology.