I don’t want to post pictures from the holidays. I’m done with the holidays and want to move on. I’m middle-aged now and don’t find much magic in the rituals anymore. Any joy I had left was by proxy: watching my daughter enjoy them. But she’s a teen now and wants to distance herself from anything family-oriented. Plus it’s the age at which being overtly happy about anything just isn’t cool. It’s cool to be a cynic and hate.
So I’ll pass on the tree and house light photos this year. Instead, here’s a brief reflection on one of my own moments of lost magic. Here is a single snowflake, captured poorly with my aging phone camera:
It was cold enough that individual crystals were falling without clumping together. It reminded me of when I learned what they actually are.
Another consequence of a Texan upbringing, I didn’t see much snow. Some light dustings here and there, but rarely anything of consequence. So I knew snow mostly from movies. And there’s a particular scene in Disney’s Fantasia with fairies dancing in snowfall, using individual snowflakes as dresses. Granted I’d never seen a fairy before either, but my assumption was that they’re 6-12 inches tall. Representations in various media confirm this, probably because that’s a good size to work the physical world around. Any smaller and our existing environment wouldn’t scale well to make understandable films, any larger and they’re just small people. Ergo, I made the connection that a snowflake dress, presented as being as wide as the fairy was tall, would therefore be around 6-12 inches in diameter.
So you might understand my disappointment when, on a rare day of Texas snow, when my mother exclaimed “Snowflakes!” when glancing out the window, that I was greeted with the sight of tiny specks of white, and not gargantuan plates of ice crystals, floating gracefully to the ground. Such is life.
But still, on a micro level, individual snowflakes are pretty cool to look at.
–Simon