Snow days – aren’t they wonderful? You rush outside with the kids as the soft flakes settle, wrapped up warm in hats, coats, scarves – and gloves. Everyone has a matching pair and is happily making snowmen, and there’s definitely nobody screaming because they could only find one glove that’s already soaked through, leaving fingers bright red and raw and freezing and now they’re crying, and we’re all crying, and this was a terrible idea. Snow is the worst thing in the world, they should probably make it illegal – and Mummy, why did you even suggest it? We HATE snow, we’ve always hated snow, you just forget this every year because it’s pretty and makes everything look a bit like Miracle on 34th Street. Now, can we please go back inside and watch some more TV?
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Let’s start that again:
SNOW! It’s like Narnia, out there. A veritable winter wonderland. There’s a fuzzy, frosty coating on the trees, the leaves are crackling on the ground and everything feels like a poem.
Come on, kids! Let’s go out and play in it! We’ll make a pile of snowballs, and we’ll throw them at Daddy when he least expects it, and he’ll find it hilarious. He won’t mind at all when a hard and pointed missile of frozen ice smacks him clean in the forehead, leaving a bruise everyone at work will laugh about. Nobody will get grumpy about a misfired clod of snow down the back of the neck, because it’s fun – snow is fun – even if it is a bit cold and wet and feels terrible.
We’ll laugh it off, we’ll chuckle about the time grandad slipped on a patch of ice and broke his hip. Or the time the hot water pipes burst and we had to wear five jumpers to bed, and couldn’t have a bath, and the water company couldn’t come out to fix it because it was too hazardous and no-one had gritted the roads, yet. We’ll laugh about it for years – YEARS! Oh, how we’ll laugh.
Remember that brilliant winter we had, we’ll say. The one where your brother needed the toilet and did it outside and ignored all the warnings about yellow snow and tried to eat it? Haha!
Remember the pile of dog poo on the path hidden beneath the snow that your sister trod in, and walked all through the house and across the carpets before we realised what it was, and only worked it out because of the smell? LOL!
Remember how happy Mummy’s boss was when Mummy called her two minutes before that really important board meeting to tell her she wasn’t going to be able to come in to the office after all? Because the school hadn’t updated the website to let parents know if it was open, even though mummy refreshed the page 236 times, and used the f-word even more times than that? Wasn’t that amusing?
Mummy probably won’t be getting her bonus this year, but that’s okay, because everyone is smiling and being nice to each other and enjoying themselves, and nobody is shouting, “I hate you”, or “I’m going to kill you for kicking the snowman I just spent three hours making in the head”.
And it really was super-funny and ingenious to replace the carrot in the snowman’s nose with Mummy’s mobile phone – so now Mummy can’t check her emails, or take calls from her boss, or actually “work from home” like she promised, because the phone is thawing out in a bowl of uncooked rice. But Mummy needs a rest, anyway. Doesn’t she? Doesn’t she just.
Snow. Don’t you just love it? Let’s all go tobogganing!