Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Christmas Weather

Tonight's topic from Randy Seaver for Saturday Night Genealogy Fun should be interesting!

Come on, everybody, join in and accept the mission and execute it with precision.  Here's your chance to sit on Genea-Santa's lap (virtually) and tell him about your Christmas weather experiences:

1.  What Christmas-time weather have you experienced?  Does it snow at Christmas time where you live?  What are the likely temperatures at Christmas time??

2. Tell us about them in your own blog post, in a comment on this post, or in a Facebook Status post.  Please leave a link on this post if you write your own post.

My Christmas weather experiences cover a range of very different locations.

From when I was born to just before I turned 9, my family lived in east Los Angeles County.  So Christmas weather was similar to Randy's experience in San Diego:  warm and sunny, mild and cloudy, to cool and rainy.  The closest we came to snow was when my father and Uncle Tony drove up to Mt. Baldy in a pickup truck, filled the back with snow, and came back with it.  We played in it for a while, but I suspect it melted relatively quickly.

From Los Angeles my family moved to Sydney, New South Wales, Australia and lived there and in the suburbs for two years.  This is another location with warm and sunny or mild and cloudy weather in the winter, but in the Southern Hemisphere, Christmas comes during the summer!  So we had beautiful summer weather for Christmas for two years.

Back to the Northern Hemisphere, I next lived for six years in and near Niceville, Florida, in about the middle of the Florida Panhandle, with my family.  Although most people think "hot and muggy" when they think of Florida, the Panhandle does actually experience winter.  We regularly had below-freezing temperatures at some point during the winter, but mostly it was cool and rainy for Christmas.  On January 19, 1977, which I realize is after Christmas, we had one day with enough snow that it actually stuck when it hit the ground and did not melt immediately (that's also the day there were snow flurries in Miami).  We got the rest of the day off from school, but by the time everyone got home, the snow was gone.

After Florida I moved back to Los Angeles.  The weather had not changed in the intervening years, although it wasn't quite as smoggy as it had been.  On the other hand, I was in South Central Los Angeles, not east Los Angeles County, so that might have explained the improvement in the air.

I lived in Los Angeles for ten years and then headed north to Berkeley.  I was there for almost four years and then bought a house in Oakland, where I stayed for 24 1/2 years.  Christmas in the Bay Area was often rainy and almost always slightly cool.  I never saw snow where I lived, but I believe that sometimes in the Berkeley and Oakland hills they occasionally had dustings of snow.

And now I'm even further north, in the Portland Metro area of Oregon.  I'm in Gresham, east of Portland and at the west end of the Columbia River Gorge, so it's usually a little colder here than in Portland proper.  It is normal for the area to have at least a day or two of snow during the winter, sometimes around Christmas.  My first year here we had a hard freeze with no snow on Christmas, and I was stuck in my house for three days with the cats and the birds.  But a couple of years ago we had a beautiful blanket of snow in the front and back yards for Christmas, and it was beautiful.