No matter how many times I listened to the Carpenters version of the classic Christmas song, I wasn’t dreaming of a white Christmas this year. I know better than to dream of the impossible.

I guess you could say I’m longing to be up north, as the song goes. But it also isn’t quite that simple.

I have nothing to prove 2023 was the first year of my life when I didn’t see snow on the ground other than my memories. I could attempt to fact check. Go through all the places I was in during winter months and check snow records. It would take time and also, maybe, money? You can pay for a lot of services online these days including, I just learned, detailed daily snow records for any zip code in the U.S.

It’s tempting to do all that instead of writing about how not seeing snow actually makes me feel. How it makes me fear. But what would that really add to this essay? Some numbers, some dates, some facts. I already have some of all that. It wouldn’t help me better arrive at the answers I’m driving toward. It feels like driving in a blizzard without snow tires. A bit on-the-nose, I know.

As 2024 ends, I’ve done another year on this warming planet without seeing snow on the ground. There were some flurries at the tail end of a trip to New York in January. They fell fat and wet as we rode a taxi to LaGuardia and melted as soon as they met pavement. Right now as I write this, there’s snow on the ground in New York, according to some of my group chats. Hearing about it fills me with a strange sense of homesickness, an affliction I almost never experience because home for me has always been a moving target rather than a fixed place.

I miss snow more than I can explain, and I guess this essay is my way of trying to figure out why. It’s not like I grew up somewhere exceptionally snowy. And it’s not just about the snow.

My wife and I have just returned from Christmas in Richmond, Virginia, where my parents live and where I grew up nearby in the suburbs. It was, at times, cold enough to snow, but the sky remained clear, full sun. My wife got so cold at one point, she declared she could never live there. She’s a Florida swamp creature, and I love her for it. I keep taking her to Chicago, a city I love, in May and June, because I know the city will show off for her, no longer too cold to bear and not yet too sticky-hot.

There have been fewer than a dozen recorded instances of white Christmases in Richmond’s history, most of them occurring decades before I was born. But two happened in my lifetime: once in 1993, the second Christmas of my life, and again in 2010, the last time it snowed on Christmas in my hometown, 14 years ago. We got almost three inches.

The twist? We weren’t there. We were up north in Vermont at my aunt and uncle’s house, where we also had a white Christmas. We spent many Christmases at my mother’s brother’s house in Vermont exactly for this reason; it felt like real winter when we were there. But as our grandparents, who live a few doors down from the house I grew up in in central Virginia,  got older, Christmas in Richmond just made more sense. We haven’t been back to Vermont for Christmas in over a decade. The last time we did was probably the last white Christmas I’ll have seen in a very long time.

***

Mount Fuji went its longest period without snow in 130 years this year. In other words, we’re fucked. No, I know, I’m not supposed to lean into climate doom. I’m supposed to remind myself, remind you too maybe, that we can still do things to stop this. I think I would find it easier to remind myself if I were to finally see snow again. It would reset something in me, fill a quietly expanding void. I need to touch more than grass; I need to touch a snow-covered field of it.

I know I’m just making excuses. Finding snow is hard these days; slipping into doom is not.

Of course I know there are far, far worse side effects of our compounding global climate crisis than the plain fact that I haven’t seen snow in a couple of years. Deadly side effects, for humans and so many other species. I’m not trying to be self-pitying or overly romantic about snow. I’m not Lorelei fucking Gilmore. But it’s like all my compounding fears about the climate crisis have been hard-packed into a snowball in my chest. I’m projecting all my fear onto snow leaving my life.

I remember times when snow made my life very fucking hard, like tromping through the snow a mile to get to the nearest L train stop the first winter I lived in Chicago and wondering how the hell am I going to do this over and over again, year after year. 

I also know I can’t just blame the lack of snow in my life on climate change alone. Snowfall and snow cover are decreasing all over the globe, but climate change is complex. It has been responsible for some of the worst snow and freezing temperatures I’ve ever experienced, including the two polar vortexes I lived through, one powerful enough to cancel classes at my university for cold temperatures for the first time in four decades.

It may be snowing less in many places, but it still snows. New York City, where I used to live, had its first white Christmas since 2009 this year. Like the white Christmas in Richmond in 2010, I only didn’t see it because I wasn’t there. If I want to see snow so badly, I could have traveled to the northeast or upper Midwest this fall and winter instead of to Key West, Palm Springs, Portland, all places where it doesn’t really snow unless you’re way up a mountain in the latter two.

I’m being dramatic when I call my dreams of a white Christmas impossible. It’s possible, just not in the current context in which I exist, which is annually spending the holiday with my family in Richmond. I could change the context, convince my family to do Christmas somewhere colder, farther north, maybe go back to Vermont. The first Christmas without snow on the ground in my uncle’s city was 2020 though, which means there could be future years of the same.

I could see snow if I lived somewhere other than Florida.

Until 2020, I always lived in places where it would snow at least once every year, often in places where it snowed much more than that. I still remember the year we woke up to a sudden snowstorm on April 1 in Ann Arbor, a cruel April Fool’s Day joke. We thought we were in the clear; we’d already unpacked shorts because the temperature had hit fifty degrees in the months prior (now that I’m in the South, that’s when I unpack sweaters, not shorts).

It was the first time in my life when snow disappointed. Before then, snow was always exciting. My new college friends grew up around Michigan and other parts of the Midwest, and they were shocked to learn only an inch of snowfall canceled school for me back in Virginia. The three-inch snow “storm” I missed on Christmas in 2010? School would have been out for multiple days if it wasn’t already a holiday break. From a young age I knew 32 degrees and lower was the sweetspot for snow that sticks, and I loved checking the outdoor thermostat at my grandparents’ house to see if we were there. To this day, if I see any city in my weather app at 32 degrees or below, I’m thrilled. The possibility of snow!

When I was a kid, the possibility of snow meant staying up to watch the local news to see if school would be canceled. And if it was, it meant my best friend and cousin could sleepover on a “schoolnight.” In the morning, my mother would make Norwegian waffles, and we would gear up in snow pants, long thermals, hats, scarves, mittens and sweaters knit by my grandma, waterproof boots. We always had more winter gear than any other kids in the neighborhood, so we shared, everyone trying on things to see what would fit. We’d walk to the best hill in the neighborhood with a saucer, two cheap plastic toboggans, and a fancy wooden one that only really worked if the snow was hard-packed and deeper than a couple inches. We went sledding until our faces and feet were numb from the cold, and then we teetered back to the house and stripped out of our top layers, laid them out in front of the fireplace to dry. Snow days were the best days, the ultimate embodiment of the Norwegian word koselig, which means something like cozy but also more than that. Comfort, connection, closeness. Koselig is a hard feeling to find on a warming planet.

It’s not the magic of childhood snow days that I’m chasing when I long for snow. And I don’t regret my decision to live in Florida. Hell, the last personal essay I wrote for this magazine was about how committed I am to Florida, how much I love it. That’s all still true. Living here has only made me feel more connected to the natural world, more aware of the threats to it.

Sure, I wish it didn’t cost so much — to me financially and to the environment — to travel north whenever I want to. I’m not sure that would fix it either. There’s something about not seeing snow for two years that stokes the flames of my climate anxiety in ways I still don’t fully comprehend. I thought writing this would help; it has, a little. I’m still driving in the blizzard, no clear endpoint, no answer in sight.

I hear people are moving to the Midwest to escape record-breaking heat and because the winters are getting more temperate and livable there as a result of climate change, and I want to scream. I hated Chicago winters; I need them to keep being miserable, for the sake of the planet even though, yes, I want there to be relatively safer places for climate refugees to flee to when parts of the country sink further into the ocean.

I need to see snow, and maybe when I do again, I’ll finally figure out what made that need so urgent. That’s the problem, isn’t it? It’s hard to write about the absence of something in anything but the abstract. For now, the snowball in my chest remains. It’s an ache I can live with.

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