Still Dreaming of That White Christmas
By Carl Heintze
Christmas is a time of many symbols: carols, pine trees, Santa Claus, the stable, wise men and a star. But it often seems the most important of these is something seldom seen where we live in California: snow. A White Christmas is a part of so many Christmases, it's often taken for granted.
But, of course, snow is not assured in Santa Clara County at Christmas. I suppose it is possible. Certainly it could be found in California by going to the Sierra Nevada, but in the Santa Clara Valley Christmas is not white, except in the imagination.
Growing up in California means growing up without white Christmases, just as it does where the first Christmas happened in the Holy Land. It does sometimes snow in the Holy Land, but as in lowland California it does not happen very often. As native Californians neither my family nor I knew a White Christmas. For the first half dozen years of our lives together, we celebrated the yuletide with brown hills and fields and rain, but never snow.
Native Californians all, at Christmastime we dreamed of snow, but never saw it. Instead we hung our Christmas trees with its imitations, sent cards to others with depictions of white, but never knew it .
Until, that is, one year when it happened that we went to live temporarily in New Jersey, in a rented house, in an old town where people spoke English with odd accents and where we felt ourselves strangers in a strange land.
Fall came, and we reveled in its color, colors such as we never saw at home. And then it was winter and Thanksgiving. And finally Advent came. That year, we had a tree of sorts, one not unlike the one Charlie Brown used to try to decorate. It stood forlornly by the front window, scraggly and small, but it had lights upon it.
Our family and friends were far away.
But we determined to make it Christmas nevertheless. Almost miraculously there were presents under the undernourished tree, and we invited new-found friends to dinner on Christmas Day. Strangers in a strange town, themselves, they agreed to come.
And then, miracle of miracles, on Christmas Eve it began to snow.
In big downy flakes it drifted down on our unfamiliar house and on its yard, mounding on the eaves, covering the driveway and the street. By nightfall, it had managed to pile six inches everywhere.
For us it was magic. Children and adults, we sat and watched, fascinated, overjoyed by its arrival. We had been granted our first white Christmas.
It overwhelmed us. We could not contain our joy.
After supper we climbed into our coats, mufflers and mittens and rushed outdoors. The children scuffed through it in wonder. The adults made and threw snowballs.
We blew out our breaths in white clouds. We laughed, we danced, we longed to share our joy with others.
Together we walked around our block, the strange block on which we now lived. Stopping at every lighted window, we sang off-key but earnest Christmas carols.
That was, after all, what we had seen all those with snow do on Christmas cards, in the movies, in books and poems, those happy carolers singing in the snow.
The Easterners who had lived there all their lives peered out their windows at these weird Westerners celebrating snow, curiously, wondering what was wrong with us. None of them joined us. But we did not care. We were overcome with the wonder of a Christmas such as we had never seen before and would never see again in the same way.
We loved it. Our cheeks rosy with the cold, our spirits soaring with the season, at last we came home to our temporary home away from home, filled anew with the warmth and wonder of Christmas .
Many years have passed since that Yuletide in New Jersey. Our children have grown up, moved away, married and now have children of their own.Yet none of us have ever forgotten that singular Christmas in a rented house in a New Jersey town, a continent away, our first white Christmas.
Gifts may have become larger and more expensive. We may have had more people at later Christmas dinners, but no Christmas has ever been quite so memorable as that Christmas in the snow.
We still dream, even today, of such a White Christmas.
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Willow Glen, California Since 1992
