I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas

Oh the weather outside is frightful

Let it Snow! Let it Snow! Let is Snow!

Frosty the Snowman

Any holiday song about snow, weather or cold fits perfectly what is going outside at our house! And YES! We might have a White Christmas. It will be our children's first White Christmas!

Wednesday the 17th a "huge storm" was supposed to blow in. They even cancelled school just in case. We woke up to a very little bit of white stuff on the ground. In fact I couldn’t even leave a foot print when I went for the morning paper. Many people were upset that officials cancelled so many events, but they must have forgotten or weren't here for the winter storm of 1990. That was our first storm. The snow started to fall Friday around noon and some kids didn't make it home from school that day because the roads were so bad. We left a day or two later to go to California for Christmas and it took us over four hours to get to Tacoma. That is normally an hour trip in moderate traffic. Two weeks later when we came home from our holiday travels cars were still abandoned in the medians. Snow cripples the northwest and officials were being cautious.

Then Wednesday evening the white stuff, seen about once a year in Redmond and only for a day or two, came falling down. Thursday morning we get the call that seminary and school is cancelled. YEAH! A snow day! Here is what our winter wonderland looked like.

Our maple tree ouside our front door.

Alex (in the dead center of this photo) is a chicken and a scaredy cat.

He found that the snow was past his face and didn't want anything to do with it and ran straight back into the garage.

Jessie.

(Hey, mother, why don't you even clean her coat?)

Of course Mother Nature wasn't done with us. This is what it looked like on Friday morning as I sent my two boys off skiing with a friend. It was a gorgeous sunrise!

The fence acorss the street from our house.

Saturday the snow continued. I would say we had a good 11 inches by the end of the day. But they had predicted a rather nasty storm to blow in during they day. It was so nasty that they thought 90 mph winds to whip through the region. We, with the rest of the town, made sure our cars were full of fuel as well as our gas cans, just in case we needed to run the generator to stay warm. Our neighborhood gas station was out of gas by noon. We also tried to finish up some last minute Christmas shopping but the lines were so long that it wasn't worth it.

Looking down into downtown Redmond on our errands.

This picture doesn't do it justice! I was like a picture out of postcard.

Now this looks like a postcard.

Saturday night we went to bed prepared to wake to darkness and cold. We only had one twinkle of the lights around 11pm. Thankfully we kept power all night and the storm wasn't as severe or just plain missed us.

Sunday morning there was a good sheet of ice covering the snow and it looked like we had a couple more inches added to the foot already on the ground. That morning I took some time and beat the heavy snow off some of the bushes. Earlier this year we had a freak snow flurry in April and it topped my ornamental cherry tree. We tried desperately to trim it up, but it ended up looking like it went to HairMasters. I didn't want that to happen to my rhodies.