The year before our family packed up and moved to Louisiana a winter storm moved through southern California on Christmas Eve dumping several inches of snow in the local mountains. The next day we decided to take the short drive from our home in Victorville to the mountain town of Wrightwood to enjoy a rare white Christmas.
I figured that Wrightwood would be a logical destination to go play in the snow instead of Big Bear. which is also nearby. There were two reasons for this, one being that just about every yahoo in Los Angeles tries to navigate the narrow roads up to Big Bear when it snows and it can take hours just to get there and the other is that we would have to fight the crowds. Odds are we probably wouldn't have had much fun after enduring all the aggravation
Wrightwood may not have a lake but it is equally as nice.
Just as I had figured the roads up to Wrightwood were open and there was very little traffic. Finding a place to park was also easy. We found a place along a side street to stop, someplace where there wasn't any ice or snow.
We spent the day walking around the town taking in the sights. It had been a couple of years since I last saw snow. It sometimes snows back home in Victorville but it rarely amounts to much. Well except for the time it snowed three feet. That of course was one of those once in a lifetime events in the California high desert.
The experience was just as magical as you would imagine. A quant mountain town covered in brilliant white drifts of snow. The fact that it was actually Christmas just added a little special something to what was already a Hallmark card moment.
Little did I know that was going to be the last time that I would lay eyes on the white stuff for several years. It rarely if ever snows here in central Louisiana. You do get a once in a decade ice storm around here and they are anything but fun. The stuff looks white and if you try real hard you can almost convince yourself that it is snow. That is until you venture out onto it and the experience is something like being at center ice at the Honda Center. There's no hockey game, just you slipping and falling on your butt as you try to get back inside.
It really makes a westerner like myself long for the mountains. For now anyway it is nice to look back at that truly special Christmas and remember the kids sledding and lobbing snowballs at each other and all the pine trees covered in white.
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