White Christmas: Shovelling Out and Digging It

The heaps of snow that we've had in Vancouver are turning to slush and puddles. Many of the sidewalks are covered in a hard, grey, slippery pack. Rain has returned. This is why we don't like snow.

For a while there it was pretty. A white Christmas with the snow gently falling, piling up right up to our doorway and thickening into spongy wedges on rooftops. As the snow kept falling and people kept shovelling up the fresh snow, Vancouver's sidewalks turned into a network of trenches surrounding by the amorphous white bulks of trees.

Of course, the television and newspapers were constantly gnashing their teeth about all the travel chaos that was taking place across the lower mainland.

You didn't have to turn to the media reports to see it. There were many cars - ones that should have been left grounded under their snow piles - trying to negotiate the huge drifts.

On Christmas Eve, I nipped outside to the end of the block to take a photograph of the snow as it got dark and ended up pushing 3 cars. That was just on our block. None of the cars had the clearance for the two foot of white stuff that had been dumped in the middle of all the roads.

As my neighbour said when the snow started falling, "Vancouver drivers don't know snow." One driver I helped revved his little engine to the point where it starting fuming an acrid cloud of smoke. The second, I actually drove the car out, and with the third car, it took twenty minutes before a group of us hacking and shovelling could free it from its icey vice.

Like many, we had to reschedule some Christmas holiday plans. It didn't matter. We can walk most places where we really need to get to - shops, cafes, bars, restaurants, liquor store - even with thigh-high powder to negotiate.

In fact, after lounging in the warm indoors, a brisk walk through the neighbourhood in its pristine, quiet, and otherworldly whiteness seemed a perfectly festive way to lighten these short, dark days of winter.