It was the night before Christmas, and it was snowy—very snowy—but not quite snowy enough to suit the tastes of the sometimes-intransigent Tiny Tim (grandson of Martin Chuzzlewit, who is not to be confused with the always-pleasant lad, Tiny Tim Cratchit, son of Bob (nee Robert) who was formerly employed at Scrooge and Marley), because Mr. Ebenezer Scrooge, to the rue of Seth Pecksniff, had already given Tiny Tim Chuzzlewit his Christmas present, a Flexible Flyer sled, and the snow was not deep enough to cushion the Baker Street cobblestones (actually large gravels washed up on the Cornish coast and used as London pavers), so the sled runners scraped on the cobblestones making a terrible, caterwauling racket, though, quite frankly, not all that caterwauling nor all that terrible, because snow, as you know, tends to muffle noise, causing the noise to dissipate rather quickly due to the phenomenon of the Doppler effect, which being something of a scientific law, the Doppler effect works just as well on Baker Street Hill as it does on the plains of Kansas, a flat or “flattish” landscape, where it presumably, and for comparison sake, rains as hard as it does on the plains in Spain (affirmed by the noted meteorologist Prof. Henry Higgins), and while the same can be said of snow in Kansas, Spain and London, at least regarding the application of the physical laws known as the “Doppler effect” at the same precisely-measured elevation above sea level as Baker Street Hill, and meaning that snow, whether wet snow or dry snow or icy, granular snow, compares equally in all three locations, the same outcome—the muffling effect—does not apply to the snows of Vermont, for as you must have been taught in public school, the man that Vermonters called “Robert Frost” (their white-haired apparition of “Jack Frost” as he is known throughout the rest of New England) wrote poetically of snow and its many pleasing qualities, not the least of which is the very noisiness of snow that the snow itself makes when it falls from the heavens and lands in the forest where, ironically indeed, trees do not make a sound at all when they fall in the same forest as does Vermont snow, yet Vermont snow does make noise if Robert Frost is to be believed, and he may be infallible in so far as we can determine, because these forests are populated wholly by maple-syrup trees, which of course, give the Green Mountains their name, at least in summer, but perhaps not in autumn as maple trees turn a blazing orange-red at that time of year, but as Robert Frost seemed to be a snow-creature—the Yeti poet, as Vermont Buddhists call him—he would not know of leaves, an ignorance that manifested itself in his once taking the wrong road in a yellow wood, and he probably knew not much about people, Buddhists or other ilk, as he often stopped by woods on snowy evenings, and further, would stop his horse-drawn sleigh without any farmhouse near, which in turn, caused his horse to give his harness bells a shake to warn (reportedly; albeit a human reaction in most cases) Vermont folk of the Yeti poet’s presence, but regardless of how often or how hard the horse jingled the harness bells, the only reply that the horse would hear was the sweep of easy wind and downy flake.
Another great moment in wintertime literature brought to you by David Allen.
MERRY CHRISTMAS
