Now I will say what needs to be said, fellow Floridians. It will bring scorn down upon us. Ridicule. Condemnation. The rest of the country will curse us for even thinking it.
But it must be said: It’s too beautiful outside and I wish it would stop.
All this warm, pleasant, blue-sky weather is getting a little old. A little tiring. A little drab.
It doesn’t feel like Christmas. I wish it was cooler. I wish it felt like winter. I wish I could wear a sweater. Or galoshes. Or some ear muffs. I wish winter wasn’t so darn incredible here!
Ahhh, it feels better to get that out.
How do you get into the Christmas spirit when it feels like summer outside? When the winter clothes are still tucked away and you’re trying to figure out how to make flip-flops look more festive? (A sprig of holly, maybe?)
Christmas music and sweating don’t go together. It feels awkward. Strange. Somehow sacrilegious.
I want chilly holiday weather. Something miserable so I can complain about it like the rest of the country.
I feel horrible, and even ungrateful, thinking it. But there it is.
On a conference call the other day with a colleague in Washington D.C., the conversation began with a description of the cold, wet, miserable weather up north. “So before we start, please tell me how beautiful it is down there,” this poor northerner asked me.
What is a Floridian to do in a situation like that? We can’t tell the truth. That it’s incredible outside — simply amazing! — but we don’t really like it? “You know this 70 degrees with sunny skies is so passé. So yesterday! And the humidity is simply murder on my curls! What I wouldn’t do for 50-degree weather, a cardigan and a sky the color of pavement.”
We would get hung up on! We would get called lunatics and under-appreciating buffoons. We might cause a national incident. Congress would pass a bill to revoke our statehood. To give us to the Bahamas.
So instead we must keep our real views silent. We must half-heartedly brag about our Chamber of Commerce weather, which is only satisfying to visitors from North Dakota or places where you have to chip your car out of an iceberg.
Ahhh, to think about icebergs! Ho-hum.
But not us. The other night my wife apologetically said to me, “I hope you’re OK with it, but I had to put the air conditioning on. It was 78 degrees in here.”
OK?!? Lower it further. Make it snow inside! Make me put on flannel pants and brew hot cocoa and snuggle up in a blanket like the olden days when our sad, un-insulated house used to give me frostbite.
Come on, old man winter. Bring us a blast. Bring us some chills. Make us Floridians rue the day we ever dreamed of chilly weather. Make us shiver in our holly-decorated flip-flops. (Just don’t tell anyone up north. They’ll give us to the Bahamas.)