33

 CHRISTMAS: A HALLMARK MYTH?   I grew up in the Midwest during the end of what climatologists call the Little Ice Age; a short period of time when the Northern Hemisphere was supposedly much colder than normal. What I recall about winter, up through my undergraduate college days, are frequent cold snaps and snow falling shortly after Thanksgiving accompanied by a season-long hard freeze. We built snowmen, had snowball fights and sledded down a hill at the local cemetery for the entire month of December. Snow continued to fall throughout the month, and rivers, lakes, and ponds were solid enough to support ice skating—and/or the occasional teenaged driver slipping and sliding in his hotrod from shore to shore. We did not have sleigh rides—those disappeared (along with stringing popcorn) with my parents’ generation due to the invention of the snowplow. Sudden thought: Once in a while we’d “bully” each other by taking someone down and “washing” his face with snow—gave one a nice ruddy comp