Winter officially started last Friday, but it feels like it hit us months ago. If anyone was wondering why I haven’t been posting lately, I have a simple explanation: I hate winter. Truly, madly, deeply hate it. Last year, I was dreading the onset of our annual curse all through Halloween and Thanksgiving but, as everyone knows, Minnesota was given an unexpected reprieve. It was enough of a miracle to restore my belief in the power of prayer. This year, I knew going in that last winter was a fluke, so my attitude was even more entrenched than usual for me.
I didn’t always feel this way about winter. Eons ago when I was in grade school, my best friend Byrne and I would trek the five or six blocks to Armatage Park and go skating when we could, regardless of the temperature. When we were even younger, we would sometimes take our sleds to Armatage and slide down the hills on the Penn Avenue side of the park because they were the closest slopes of any significant height. Sometimes we’d build a couple of snow forts in Byrne’s front yard and have snowball fights with all of the kids in the neighborhood. Actually, Byrne was the builder and truly inspiring at it. He built things all the time. He once build an amazing two-story fort out of scrap lumber that he, his two younger brothers and I would camp out overnight in. It looked like hell, but it was so well-built that it lasted for at least a couple of summers. (I lost touch with Byrne soon after high school, but in thinking about him here I was inspired to Google him and I found him. Quelle surprise! He’s got his own home remodeling business here in Minneapolis.) But getting back to winter, once I was old enough to ride my bike to school, winter and I were no longer on speaking terms because it meant I had to walk to school. And things only got worse between winter and me when I started high school.
I went to De La Salle High School, which is on Nicollet Island in downtown Minneapolis, and I had to take the bus to school. That meant standing on the corner each morning until the bus arrived, then walking four or five blocks – including the dreaded Hennepin Avenue bridge over the Mississippi River. I’m not a morning person to begin with, so this daily ordeal felt particularly cruel. My experience was only slightly better when I went to the U of M. I still took the same bus each morning, but at least I’d eventually be dropped off at Coffman Union where I could thaw out and fortify myself for the day with a cup of hot, sweet coffee. The only catch was that many of my classes were on the West Bank, and so I had to walk across the bridge over Mississippi again several times each week. The bridge had an enclosed walkway, so I was largely spared the relentless biting wind that swept down the river, but it was still bitterly cold.
I had many good reasons to move to the San Francisco area when I did, but you can be sure that the prospect of mild winters was among them. The winters in San Francisco do have their own tortures, but they’re nothing compared to Minnesota. The temperatures hover in the 40’s, the wind off the Pacific Ocean howls, and it rains like the Monsoons from Thanksgiving until St. Patrick’s Day. But, as they say, you don’t have to shovel rain or scrape the frost off the car windows every morning. There were other compensations, too. It was always amusing to watch the locals scramble for shelter during the rare thunderstorm. The same people for whom an earthquake is about as frightening as a day-old dollop of Cool Whip would scurry indoors as if Judgement Day was upon them at the first clap of thunder.
I apparently inherited this aversion to winter from my father. I have no memory of Dad ever complaining about the cold, just some faint recollections of his occasionally asking Mom to touch up the thermostat a bit. But when he passed away, my Mom made sure he had his longjohns on underneath his proudly worn Army uniform because, she said, he so hated to be cold. She and my sister got such a chuckle out of it, that I’m certain it was true. So I count this among the several recessive genes that I blame him for passing on to me. I didn’t get his stalwart work ethic, his enduring discipline for exercise in the face of middle age, or even a hint of his unheralded artistic talents that I could so desparately use for my work online. No, I got the receeding hairline, the beady eyes crowned by eyebrows like thornbushes, and a weak mouth, all topped off with this aversion to cold.
I want you to know that I actually had a respectable reason for starting to write this article. For the past few weeks, I had it in mind to suggest that people pack their families into the car and ride around their neighborhood to see the Christmas lights on the houses as my family did when I was very young. You know – the ‘staycation on a budget’ thing for winter. The real treat, of course, was when we’d all go downtown to see the animated displays in the store windows, but this was the next best thing. Home decorations were far simpler than the extravaganzas we often see now, and were generally limited to strings of lights along the eaves and around the doors and windows. But there were always a few ambitious people who would buy lighted figural decorations, like a snowman or a manger scene. My strongest memory is of a house up the street that had Santa’s sleigh on their roof, complete with four sets of reindeer that would light up sequentially to look like Santa was flying over the rooftop. Around that time, the corner drugstore (yes, a classic corner Rexall drugstore, complete with a soda fountain) would display Christmas tree light sets in their window. They always had one set of Noma lights, which had small vertical tubes of bubbling liquid that were heated by the lights. The package was perched in the window just at the level of my 8 year-old eyes and fascinated me every time I walked by, which was every day since it was on my way to school. That set was there for so many years that I still remember that the colors on the box had faded – even though they only put them out for Christmas.
I’d lived in California nearly 20 years before I thought of asking my wife to take a tour of our little town with me. We only did it twice, but we had a blast both times. The neighborhood where I lived wasn’t neatly laid out in simple avenues and cross-streets like south Minneapolis. We were nestled in a small town along the Pacific coast in the mountains that run up the San Francisco penninsula, where houses are spread across the hillsides like chunky peanut butter and every other street seems to end in a cul-de-sac. Because I worked at home and I’m terminally lazy, I never learned the streets where we lived much beyond what was necessary to get to the local Safeway and the adjoining freeway, so these trips always involved a lot of back-tracking to find a recognizable landmark. It amazed me how many people had decorations to celebrate a winter holiday in Sunny California. Some streets were as dazzlingly lit as the Las Vegas Strip, with front yards filled with animated displays that rival the attractions in Disneyland. It was incredible how many decorated houses we saw in trips that rarely took more than 30 minutes.
It was actually the impressive installations that I’d seen on the streets I pass on my regular trips to the Post Office that inspired me to give this project a try. In pursuit of this idea, I trudged down our street a week before Christmas to make a trial run taking pictures of the handful of decorated houses nearby using my spiffy new digital SLR camera that I’d purchased a couple of months ago and hadn’t had a chance to really use yet. I never read the instructions for the camera I had before, often to my regret, and since the new camera was even more complicated, I made sure I could use the manual settings for this new beastie. I even spent some time reading online tutorials for taking pictures of Christmas displays. The results were far from spectacular, but good enough to plan on taking more pictures as soon as I can muster the ambition. Assuming the temperatures don’t plummet below zero for a while yet. Man, I hate winter!
