No Days Like Snow Days

Snow Days rock on so many different levels. For a kid a snow day is like hitting the lottery. It might be a real pain for working parents who need to arrange childcare, but for a youngster it's magic.

Snow Days rock for kids because a friendly force of nature overrides all adult and institutional authority, and generally nobody has to die over it. There's a hint of adult surrender in a snow day announcement that no kid will miss.

I remember listening on my Mom's transistor radio to a long roster of closings; if you missed your school's name you had to wait 15 minutes. Online snow day reporting is one of the true improvements that the web delivers. The night before an anticipated snow day, gradeschool kids are pressing the Refresh button on KDKA.com like it was a one-armed bandit. It would be interesting to see what the hit count is.

I think that if weather.com wanted to improve their eyeballs among the crucial 7-to-16-year-old consumer demographic, they could report on the statistical likelihood of school closings the next day, maybe something like this:

Snow Days rock for me because it's a day when something takes precedence over Business or the Schedule, and we very rarely let anything take precedence over Business or the Schedule. And yet, somehow, we catch up and move on.

Snow Days rock for working folks if (and only if) you've got a job that lets you take the day without losing salary. Otherwise, you just missed 20% of your hours this week, and the Mastercard company doesn't reduce your bill because it snowed.

Snow Days rock for recent immigrants from the South, who really don't get this Yankee stuff and are pleased to be excused from our strange rituals, where people look forward to driving in the snow while talking on their cellphones and demonstrating the implications of physics.

I am grateful for the potentates who make their snow day decisions early in the day, rather than the stingy souls who wait until 0500 to make their call, hoping for safety in numbers. I am particularly impressed at the several rural districts who threw in the towel for the whole week on Wednesday, announcing that they're closed until Monday. I think they're probably generous and light-hearted people. Good karma.