Channeling Charlie Brown

The Peanuts comic strip and television specials have been a part of American life since the strip began running in newspapers in 1950, and they’ve generated memorable images and moments that have stuck with basically everyone who grew up with an awareness of them. Odds are good that even if you’ve never watched A Charlie Brown Christmas, you still refer to a tiny, needle-challenged resident at a Christmas tree farm as a “Charlie Brown tree” because of its similarity to the one that Charlie Brown makes a part of the gang’s Christmas play. Another memorable moment – and one that’s repeated numerous times throughout both forms of Charlie Brown media – is Lucy offering to hold the football for Charlie Brown to kick it. Ever hopeful that Lucy will finally hold the ball still so that he can successfully kick it long, high, and far, Charlie Brown always allows her to suck him in when she promises not to yank the ball away. . . and every time, he finds himself kicking air and landing unceremoniously on his backside. He knows better, but. . .

And that, my friends, is what it’s like to be an unjaded, snow-loving Southerner.

See, although it’s not all that common for us to get measurable amounts of snow, it’s a bit more common for weather forecasting models to predict it. . . which makes meteorologists the Lucy to our Charlie Browns. We’ll look at the 10 day forecast from The Weather Channel or WeatherBug and see a relatively high probability of an inch or more of snow, and we’ll start envisioning snowmen, snow ice cream, and snow days. . . only to keep watching the date of the predicted snowfall as it gets closer and see the probability and amount decrease. By the time the actual day rolls around? Nada. That 90% chance of 3 to 5 inches of snow they were predicting five days ago on January 11 turns into clear, sunny skies on January 16, and those of us who had dared to hope are on our metaphorical backsides after the kicking the air again.

I know that those who live in parts of the world in which snow is an ever-present wet and frosty nuisance probably don’t get the fascination that so many of us in the Deep South have with the white stuff. We’re well aware that many of those same people find the whole concept of forecasts of minimal amounts of frozen precipitation prompting customers to wipe stores out of bread, milk and toilet paper pretty doggone funny. We’re also well aware that they can be pretty condescending about the fact that those same minimal amounts prompt school closings and set the stage for numerous traffic accidents. After all, plenty of people in other regions of the country seem to enjoy taking advantage of any opportunity to perpetuate negative stereotypes about Southerners, perpetually failing to realize what Jake Perry points out in the film Sweet Home Alabama: just because we talk slow doesn’t mean we’re stupid. (Okay, to be grammatically correct, Jake should’ve said “slowly”. . . but lack of mastery of all grammatical rules doesn’t mean a person’s stupid, either. And yes, you “heard” that from an English teacher.)

Here’s the thing: people just don’t tend to respond to the things that they aren’t used to the same way they do to the things that they are used to. We aren’t used to driving in snow. We aren’t prepared to de-ice roads on a regular basis. Therefore, we aren’t going to drive as proficiently as those who have snowplow attachments affixed to the front bumpers of their trucks (which I never knew was a thing until I spent a snowy January weekend in southern Maine a few years ago), and we’re going to try to avoid the risk of having to drive somewhere in those conditions to get something we need – and we may do a little bit of slipping and sliding if the whole driving thing proves necessary. Okay, so some people do take raiding the grocery store to extremes. . . but as my amazing middle school English teacher, the late Jacquelyn Pilcher Abbott, used to say, it’s better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it. (Oh, and it’s worth noting that summer temperatures that knock the Northeast flat on its collective keester don’t faze us. That’s because basically everyone down here has AC, you say? You don’t have AC. . . we don’t have snowplows. See the parallel?)

And as for the question of why we’re so fascinated with snow. . . that also goes back to how people respond differently to that which they aren’t used to. In his 1836 essay Nature, Ralph Waldo Emerson discusses how we react to seeing stars: “If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile.” Translation: we’d get a lot more excited about seeing stars if they popped out once every millennium, but they’re not such a big deal to us because we can see them on any clear night. Think about how much more excited the world gets about solar eclipses and rarely appearing comets. . . and as big a deal as the Perseid meteor shower is every year, we Southerners see it more often in our neck of the woods than we do an inch of snow on the ground. I’ll admit that part of our excitement about snow is the potential for a snow day out of school (and I can tell you that as a teacher, I get way more excited about snow days now than I ever did as a student), but most of it is just about the snow itself: watching it fall, seeing it transform the world into a blanket of white, being able to do something about it when we want to build a snowman. We may see it more often than once in a thousand years, but I can say this: my kids are 10 and 11, and I can count on one hand the number of times they’ve gotten to play in snow in their own yard. It’s a big deal.

Speaking of playing in it in their own yard. . . last night, Lucy actually did hold the football, sort of. We were initially supposed to get over an inch of snow and ended up with only a dusting, but it did pile up just a little bit under trees and on our cars. And let me tell you. . . those two kids I mentioned made the absolute most of the snow they had! They ran around on the snow-neglected ground and threw snowballs that they made from what had accumulated on the cars. My son made a mini-snowman, dispatching me into the house to track down eyes, a nose, and a mouth. (The final product ended up with googly eyes and looked a lot like Forky from Toy Story 4.) They used their imaginations to come up with ways to have fun with the snow they had, and they were only so disappointed when they had to go inside because the cars were clear and everything else was getting there as the temperature had crept above freezing. What we got wouldn’t have yielded a blink out of those who see snow all the time; to us, it was enough to make snowballs, a tiny snowman, and some treasured memories.

For tonight, Lucy has put the football away: the 10 day forecast does predict some cold weather (well, by Southern standards. . . remember that we live in a world in which you find yourself giggling when you’re singing along with “Winter Wonderland” on the car radio right before Christmas and glance down to see that the temperature outside is 75 degrees) and a little bit of precipitation, but they aren’t predicted at the same time. It’s hard for me to imagine what it would be like to wake up to a white Christmas on December 25 – I feel ya, Irving Berlin – or to get so sick of having to clear the driveway that I groan whenever I see the word “snow” in the weather forecast. On the other hand, though, I have to wonder what the equivalents to Northern snow are in my own life: how many things do I see every day that have lost their spark for me because I do in fact see them every day? What things do I respond to nonchalantly that would get my full attention if I weren’t used to them? And in what areas of my life have I quit attempting to kick the football because I’ve given up on the idea that Lucy is going to hold it still? I like to see myself as a “glass half full” girl who lives in the moment enough not to miss the little things that aren’t really little things. . . I just hope that I’m not wrong about that.

Most people wouldn’t put “Charlie Brown” and “role model” in the same sentence. After all, he loses more than he wins. . . he ends up with a bag full of rocks at Halloween. . . and of course there’s that doggone football. More often than not, though, he proves to be a boy with a firm grasp on a precious gift: the gift of hope. Maybe it does leave him staring up at the sky every time he attempts those kicks, but it also enables him to see the potential in a scrawny little Christmas tree when no one else can. . . at least at first. And in the grand scheme of it all, aren’t we better off hoping and looking for the potential for good things – even though we’re sometimes disappointed – than we are protecting ourselves so effectively from the bad that we never truly experience anything other than this sort of blah middle ground? Again, I hope I’m not wrong about that.

Maybe that’s why I still hope for snow.