Wishing you a frozen Christmas

Talk of your cold!
Through the parka’s fold
It stabbed like a driven nail.

If our eyes we’d close,
Then the lashes froze
Till sometimes we couldn’t see;

It wasn’t much fun,
But the only one
To whimper was Sam McGee.

Photos this week of New England -- the lush and beautiful New England I visited in August -- have displayed a world embedded in ice. No power for 1.5 million homes, probably for days. We can only imagine families wrapped in blankets, huddled with no light and no heat. Just before Christmas.

Here in the Northwest we feel pretty safe from natural calamities, barring the occasional earthquake or volcanic eruption. This fall's been unusually mild, with highs in the 50's and lows in the 40's virtually every day. But -- lest we get too smug -- an Arctic air mass is moving in tonight. Very cold temperatures are expected for at least the next ten days, with snow falling most days next week.

The weather honchos are predicting a low of 11 degrees Monday night. That may seem comfortably moderate to all those poor suckers who've spent their entire pathetic lives in Buffalo, Bangor or Boston -- or to Sam McGee and his fellow Yukon prospectors. But around these parts, eleven degrees is very rare. It's the kind of temperature that allows kids to skate on lakes, just like in olden times, instead of on a rink at the mall. It's the kind of temperature that runners won't run in, for fear of freezing their lungs. It's a world in which mittens become mandatory, when even the most determined teenager won't walk to school in a t-shirt!

But still it's exciting, especially at Christmas. It allows us to join with our East Coast and Mid-West brothers and sisters in a frozen solidarity. It recalls Christmas scenes of an earlier, Dickensian London. It plucks us out of our bland Northwest drizzle and places us into a real life snowy Christmas card or into a painting of Hans Brinker racing on silver skates down frozen canals.

Yup, I love the picturesque. I can ignore for a week the sound of the furnace burning oil unceasingly, and I won't mind at all having my fingers grow numb and my nose red whenever I run down to the store. I don't even mind negotiating a bit of snow on the road as I dash downtown for last minute shopping.

But please -- no multi-day power outages.