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Growing up in Northern California, I've only seen snow at Christmas maybe twice in my life! I was always jealous of my cousins on the East Coast with their white Christmases.

I'm a Santa Ana boy from 1940 to all my life. And Santa Ana was different only in the fact that Orange County was just small. Hell, I used to ride my motorcycle through the orange groves, and now it's tracts of homes.

Never open a book with weather. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways to describe ice and snow than an Eskimo, you can do all the weather reporting you want.

I grew up thinking of snow as a luxury you visit.

Although I love snow, it messes things up terribly around Seattle, with all of our hills. I worry about my loved ones driving.

I grew up on the edge of a national park in Canada - timberwolves, creeks, snow drifts. I really did have to walk home six miles through the snow, like your grandparents used to complain.

I remember three- and four-week-long snow days, and drifts so deep a small child, namely me, could get lost in them. No such winter exists in the record, but that's how Ohio winters seemed to me when I was little - silent, silver, endless, and dreamy.

To get the feel of the polar night, I went back to Spitsbergen in winter. I went snowshoeing in the dark and experimented with headlamps and climbed a glacier in driving snow.

Snow provokes responses that reach right back to childhood.

I'm going to North Pole to help out Santa this year.