Location Taken: Arcadia, Michigan
Time Taken: December 2008
It’s in the 90’s here, and will be all goose-wrangling week. So it’s time for snow pictures again! Happy falling flakes, and I’m not just talking about me!
For Christmas, we just about always go north to visit the grandparents. Usually we spend Christmas itself with my Mom’s folks, out in the far north of Michigan, right in the lake effect snow belt.
Lake effect snow belts are areas where a large amount of snow falls in a region because of the presence of a large body of water (the lake) upwind from the region. As the weather frontlines pass over the lake, the clouds collect water from the warm lake, filling up the clouds. Then the frontline hits the colder land and the moisture falls right back out of the clouds, as snow. In this case, it is Lake Michigan, which is quite large and thus produces a very large amount of snow. For up to a hundred miles away from the lake, large fluffy flakes fall from the sky. It’s very common for there to be multiple feet of snow on the ground for most of the winter.
Christmas, though, is right near the start of the snow season in Michigan. Some years very little snow has fallen and we have a green Christmas. White Christmases are much more common. Even this last Christmas, when very little snow had fallen anywhere in the country, we had a small bit of snow fall on Christmas morning itself. It melted by the next day but still, we had snow for Christmas.
This photo was not from last year. This was a much snowier year.
The dunelands of northwest Michigan seem to be a great place for growing Christmas trees, given just how many Christmas Tree farms there are in the area. My grandparents don’t get their tree from those farms, though. They have a stand of trees of their own, planted a while ago. Every year Grandpa goes out and cuts one down. They’ve grown too tall for putting inside the house, so they get leaned against the deck right outside the living room and decorated with lights and some ornaments. And natural snow.
We don’t put any delicate ornaments on the tree, nor do we put the presents under the tree (they’d get wet). Instead they go out in a pile on the porch, and get distributed on Christmas morning in a more orderly fashion. We’ve never tried to pretend that the presents came from anyone but the actual giver, so I never had that classic time of learning Santa wasn’t real. I’d never been deceived in the first place. We do occasionally use “From Santa” for gifts the giver wants to keep a bit more anonymous (aka joke gifts), but we’re just as likely to put a dog’s name in there instead. My dogs have given some really interesting presents over the years.
It’s not a typical Christmas tableau. We don’t have the pile of presents carefully placed (after the kids go to bed, of course) under an ornately decorated tree. There are no cookies and milk left out overnight. We don’t even do stockings any more (we did for a few years, but it fell to the wayside). Still, it is full of family togetherness and joy, and we all happily open our presents and munch on the popcorn balls Grandma makes. Which is one of the few things she actually likes cooking, so we don’t have a full Christmas Dinner either.
