Snow of the northeast, how much do I loathe thee?  Let me count the ways.

Oh, I know.  I’ve heard the speech for 35 winters.

“You’ve lived here all these years and California is in the distant past and the sun and waves and all that nonsense was a big illusion and you forgot that the California dream was a fantasy that hid all the ugliness and sprawl and freeways and earthquakes and you get to live in such an exciting place so why can’t you shut up about a place called Laguna Beach that was the center of the world and stop playing the darn Beach Boys music and just settle back and enjoy the:

Change of Seasons!

Yes, that is the much-touted pathetic alternative to sunshine back here.  The change of seasons.  I am told I should believe that the mystical “change of seasons” is actually something more profound than what it looks like — a depressing moment when we change from a warm and sunny and hopeful world to a cold and overcast and hopeless world.

So I ask again:  Snow of the northeast, how much do I loathe thee?

You see, it really doesn’t matter that I have spent more than half my life in New York and New Jersey. Every year I try to get myself in the frame of mind for a real hot-chocolate, fire-place, and wool sweater winter. Every year I tell myself that I won’t just love the movie Fargo, but that I will also love traipsing around in ice and snow and even love the pitch black of night that comes at around 4:40 PM in the afternoon.

I will nest. I will turn on the stupid Crockpot and put on sox. Maybe I’ll even buy one of those idiotic zip up blankets they sell on the infomercials, the ones that look like straight-jackets.   I will turn inward.

And every year I loathe it. 

Thank  goodness for one exception: We have friends down the block who punctuate winter with a beautiful and moving celebration of Christmas, an observance they center more on the lessons of the nativity than the crowds of the mall.   But that’s not for a few weeks.

Today we are having our first snow.

So feel free to join me in welcoming the first snowfall with my traditional celebratory ritual, the viewing of the web cam.

This is Poipu Beach on the Island of Kauai, where the sun shines and the waves break , a place where you turn inward as a spiritual exercise and not because it’s too disgustingly wet and cold to open the front door.

And this is the change of  seasons: