Am I Dreaming of a White Christmas? No.

I personally would love a heat wave over Christmas. Of course it would mean that climate change has become irreversible and the apocalypse would be nigh but snow sucks- lets face it.

It may look pretty but really it is just disruptive and dangerous. It may look perfect when you settled and warm inside the house and don't have to walk down the steepest hill in Birmingham to get to uni every day. Being fairly unsteady on my feet at the best of times I've already fallen over spectacularly and hurt myself.

I know the idea of a White Christmas has a special place in the Western pysche but its a complete fallacy. It comes from the Victorian idealisation of Christmas, starting with Dickens and continuing ever since then up until the modern age with things like Christmas cards depicting Robins hopping around on snow kissed ground and every Christmas movie or TV special ending with all the characters standing up at the sky in starry eyed wonder like they've never seen it falling before.

The truth is that through out the twentieth century it only snowed twice on Christmas day and even though we've had cover in recent years all it does is cause chaos like the story of that pub last year where the customers got 'snowed in' for three days between Christmas and New Year and 'had to' drink everything in stock.

Ok, so that probably wasn't too much of a hardship.

I think the desire for a White Christmas goes back to wanting to be a kid again,especially around this time of year. Snow used to mean sledging, snow ball fights and days off school for most people so to combine this with Christmas where hopefully you don't have to go anywhere and your house is heated properly I suppose it's to recapture some of the magic. However, I've never met anyone where this actually works so why do we continue to put ourselves through it?

The first few Christmases I remember didn't involve a lot of snow. Although contrary to popular belief, Northern California is not that warm in December it was still pleasant enough to not be sitting typing with your hands looking slightly blue like right now (and the heating is turned up as far as it'll go)and although they have a bad track record with a lot of things; the Americans still do Christmas better. So to me, over commercialisation and sentimentatlity, watching the San Francisco Ballet doing the Nutcracker and random heat waves are what I call Christmas.

So maybe I'm a victim of Christmas nostalgia as well as the rest of the world but I would still appreciate it if I could walk outside my house without getting bruised black and blue or developing frostbite.