"...It's mountain high, river deep..." ~Bryan Ferry
One of the first reactions from my family and friends on hearing I was moving to Canada was, "You're going to freeze your bits* off up there!!!!!" Yes, complete with multiple exclamation marks. Can you imagine how many of these marks were enunciated when they found out what season it was going to be when we got here?
I come from a place where snow is a very well known thing - it's an image that features heavily on our Christmas cards and television. We'll be sweltering in our 30+ Celcius heat, sweating over our roast lamb feast or our barbequed spread, with beautiful images of snowdrifts and ice skating illuminating our Yuletide viewing. Heck, the best displays have all kinds of dancing snowmen and glittering plastic ice crystals to marvel at! And most of the prettiest cards have some version of glittering snowflakes featured on them. To quote a friend of mine, "It's surreal".
I tell you now, if Frosty the Snowman came to life where I grew up, a/ it'd be more than a Christmas miracle and b/ his life expectancy would be all of 5 minutes as he melted down the nearest gutter. As for Santa in his jolly red suit slipping down one's chimney in order to distribute toys for all the good girls and boys; well, he might make it down there, but given he'd probably have collapsed from heat stroke in that outfit, he wouldn't be getting up again. Merry Christmas, kids!
To the majority of people in coastal Australia - and that's a whole heck of a lot of us - snow is almost a myth, something to be gasped at and upheld as the pinnacle of The Coldest It Can Get, Ever! I grew up in the western suburbs of Melbourne, and while I cannot speak for all of us, snow was a rarity that happened Somewhere Else**; probably a sign that Hell was freezing over or something weird like that. Ragnarok, anyone?
Melbourne is close to the ocean, built on a huge bay, and though I'm no meteorologist, I assume the lack of snow had something to do with the salt in the air that kept the ice crystals from forming. As a result, snow was a new experience to me. Even when I travelled to places in Australia that did have snow at certain times of the year - yes, Northerners, these do exist! We're not all beaches and desert, ya know! - the closest I ever got to seeing it were faint flecks in the foggy air and yellow sludge on the sides of the road as we drove through one chilly afternoon near Ballarat. I wanted to stop and have a look, but we had to get to where we were going. I was always a bit disappointed by that.
So here I am now, surrounded by Canadians who have been warning me that by the time winter here was over I was going to be utterly sick of snow. There's a kind of maniacal glee in their tones when they say these things; the kind of "just you wait!" in that deceptively friendly way that reminds me of the understated anticipation an Aussie expresses when getting a foreigner to try Vegemite.
I was hanging out to see my first snowfall. I was so excited about it, I was even mistaking light rain for snow. You'd think I knew rain, given Melbourne's drippy reputation (damned Sydneysiders *shakes fist*). Around me the Canadians were grumping about how cold it was getting already, and here I was, buzzing with excitement. Yay snow!
"Just you wait!" the Canadians warned me. "Is it snowing up there yet?" the Australians tittered in their emails and Skype messages, happily awaiting news of my transformation into an iceblock.
Then it started to snow.
It started slowly; just a little sprinkling on the ground, hard to see against the leaf litter. However it was snowing, and that was awesome!
I come from a place where snow is a very well known thing - it's an image that features heavily on our Christmas cards and television. We'll be sweltering in our 30+ Celcius heat, sweating over our roast lamb feast or our barbequed spread, with beautiful images of snowdrifts and ice skating illuminating our Yuletide viewing. Heck, the best displays have all kinds of dancing snowmen and glittering plastic ice crystals to marvel at! And most of the prettiest cards have some version of glittering snowflakes featured on them. To quote a friend of mine, "It's surreal".
I tell you now, if Frosty the Snowman came to life where I grew up, a/ it'd be more than a Christmas miracle and b/ his life expectancy would be all of 5 minutes as he melted down the nearest gutter. As for Santa in his jolly red suit slipping down one's chimney in order to distribute toys for all the good girls and boys; well, he might make it down there, but given he'd probably have collapsed from heat stroke in that outfit, he wouldn't be getting up again. Merry Christmas, kids!
To the majority of people in coastal Australia - and that's a whole heck of a lot of us - snow is almost a myth, something to be gasped at and upheld as the pinnacle of The Coldest It Can Get, Ever! I grew up in the western suburbs of Melbourne, and while I cannot speak for all of us, snow was a rarity that happened Somewhere Else**; probably a sign that Hell was freezing over or something weird like that. Ragnarok, anyone?
Melbourne is close to the ocean, built on a huge bay, and though I'm no meteorologist, I assume the lack of snow had something to do with the salt in the air that kept the ice crystals from forming. As a result, snow was a new experience to me. Even when I travelled to places in Australia that did have snow at certain times of the year - yes, Northerners, these do exist! We're not all beaches and desert, ya know! - the closest I ever got to seeing it were faint flecks in the foggy air and yellow sludge on the sides of the road as we drove through one chilly afternoon near Ballarat. I wanted to stop and have a look, but we had to get to where we were going. I was always a bit disappointed by that.
So here I am now, surrounded by Canadians who have been warning me that by the time winter here was over I was going to be utterly sick of snow. There's a kind of maniacal glee in their tones when they say these things; the kind of "just you wait!" in that deceptively friendly way that reminds me of the understated anticipation an Aussie expresses when getting a foreigner to try Vegemite.
I was hanging out to see my first snowfall. I was so excited about it, I was even mistaking light rain for snow. You'd think I knew rain, given Melbourne's drippy reputation (damned Sydneysiders *shakes fist*). Around me the Canadians were grumping about how cold it was getting already, and here I was, buzzing with excitement. Yay snow!
"Just you wait!" the Canadians warned me. "Is it snowing up there yet?" the Australians tittered in their emails and Skype messages, happily awaiting news of my transformation into an iceblock.
Then it started to snow.
An hour later, it looked like this:
I woke up early the next morning to see this:
Can anyone guess where this is going?
My naive countrymen, snow isn't what you need to worry about. It's the bloody stinking sneaky ice that hides beneath it and makes you fall on your arse that you have to be careful of. Though I have to say that outline of my downfall kind of looks heroic. I can see a super hero with a cloak blowing in the wind in that splatter mark.
I don't go out in it now without my rubber soled boots and stepping very, very carefully. Which is a good thing, coz the snow just kept coming. My fellow Melbournians, when you complain about a heavy frost, you really have nothing to complain about.
At least the Canadians have stopped saying, "Just you wait". Now it's, "Have you had enough?" My answer is, no. I still love it. It looks lovely floating past my firmly closed window.
*Yes, sometimes the word used merely rhymed with "bits".
**To be fair, we did occasionally get snow in the mountainous parts of Melbourne, but it was enough of a rarity to make it into the newscasts when it did happen.
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