Growing up in Los Angeles, the closest we ever came to a snow day was the period in early 1994 when our schools shut down after the Northridge Earthquake.

Since we didn't wish for earthquakes, and it never snowed, our luck was slim-to-none for closure. Although my high school did close once for asbestos, which was both unexpected and mortifying.

I actually submitted this piece yesterday which is when I heard the NPR segment. Thinking that it wouldn't be posted here I went ahead and posted it at my blog.

One of our regular readers chimed in with the following diabolical observation:

In Tahoe, snow days were officially scheduled for the week after Easter break. That way, if they were not used before that date, kids and teachers got time off; tended to make kids root for keeping school open during storms.

LOL - that's a funny story, Miles. Was it just you or did you face peer pressure from other students? If so, was your teacher aware of the ritual?

I've already had more snow days going to college here than I ever did in MN, and it wasn't for lack of snow back there. Once there was a blizzard and the streets couldn't get plowed in time, the other time the governor cancelled schools when the temp dropped to -20 and after he took a lot of flak for that it never happened again. Of course there's no snow plows out here...

OMG. This isn't really going to devolve into a shouting match is it? Haven't we had enough of that around here? This post was supposed to be a respite.

You're right, Steve... it is an odd thing. I had to chuckle as I read your comment because it made me feel less out of touch for not having ever heard of such rituals. Here I was thinking that my parochial school upbringing had isolated me from some rite of passage that I could never go back and experience afresh.

I wonder what the existance of apparently multi-generational Snow Day rituals on the East Coast say about them? It's clearly a cultural thing for them.

How odd indeed.

Like Ben, I grew up in Los Angeles (actually in Encino in the San Fernando Valley, dudes) and since we didn't have the luxury of snow days, we just cut class and went to the beach. I love living in Oregon, 15 years and counting, and would never consider returning to L.A., but I do miss three things: the warm beaches, Dodger Baseball and the Hollywood Bowl; that's about it. And I've evolved into a webfoot by now: Go Portland Beaver Baseball!

I grew up outside of Boston & we had lots of snow days, also sometimes heat days in June. I have never heard of these East Coast rituals. The parochial schools tended to follow the public school leads & on my street we all mixed after school & if anyone had such a ritual I'd guess it might have been some of the Catholic kids who came from ahnest-ta-gahd New England families, unlike my Chicago-migrating-East parents. (Eastward Ho!)

The best was the year when we had 24 inches of snow that shut stuff down for a couple of days, and then another storm that finished off that week, and then we had a week of inter-term break with no new snow but lots of time to play in it, and the mirable dictu the final Sunday of break we got another string of blizzards & lost that week too! Three weeks! Wickid pissa cool! Of course we paid in June (the school year budgeted for snow days pretty generously, but that broke the bank), but pretty much it was worth it.

The cool thing about the big blizzards was that with the combination of the snow plow ridges along the sides of the road (2 ft snow gives you 3-4 four foot ridges) and making big mounds at the end of the driveway when you shoveled, you could make these great cave forts and sometimes tunnels down the side of the road. The forts were pretty much annual, the tunnels only every few years.

When I came out to Portland for college at first I thought it was funny about people abandoning their cars on the freeway for a little snow. It wasn't an ice storm, just 3 or 4 inches of snow. (My first ice storm gave me a different kind of respect for Portland winters, of course. Also we never had freezing fog to my knowledge around Boston.)

But of course I didn't have a car in college. Even so, after a little while light started to penetrate the dimness around my skull, and to dawn on Marblehead, as the saying goes, & I started to figure out stuff like: in the Boston area we got trained about driving in snow, including stopping distance as mentioned, but also speed, pumping the brakes when stopping, turning into skids, etc. (This was before anti-lock brakes. And of course there was the classic maneuver described in the Boston Driver's Handbook in the 1980s about how to turn a corner at a T-stop in the snow: "Approach intersection. Signal left turn. Turn left. Fishtail and bounce off of parked car. Correct. Proceed." With a great little illustration.) Around Boston everyone had snow tires, not just the skiers & people who had to drive up the Gorge or through the passes to visit relatives (Portland-centric here, I know, sorry). In Boston they salted the roads to melt the snow & ice (I was amazed at the number of well-preserved old cars in Oregon, due to lack of bottoms falling out from salt induced corrosion -- it was almost like Cuba!). Around Boston they had lots of snow plows and big plowing budgets. And so on.

Gradually I came to see that Oregonians were wise & my laughter foolish -- they knew their own conditions, they knew their limits in equipment and experience, and they knew the limits of their neighbors as well. So today, being now an Oregonian, I drive like one, or avoid driving like one when I can, when it snows.

Around Boston I think we had a lot of snow days because on the one hand we really did get blizzards that made it impossible for teachers to get to schools in time or safely, even when I could have walked it, (we pretty regularly walked a mile or so to the high school on snow days to sled down the high school hill, which was big enough to be worth it & safe at the bottom) but on the other hand it tended to warm up in between. Sometimes we'd get weeks of 70 degree weather in January (one year it hit 90 one day).

In other words, it wasn't like places where once the snow comes, it pretty much stays, & you're talking permanent below freezing. (I went to school in Maine for a year before coming out to Oregon -- my hair used to freeze on the way to the dining hall from the dorm.)

A grown-up Boston ritual, in the actual city, that I think still goes on, was sort of like taping areas for the Rose Parade, but more serious. If you lived in town and had on-street parking, after a good snow storm you had to dig out -- get however many inches off your actual car itself, then dig the snow in front and in back (running the engine to warm it up in the meantime), plus whatever the initial snow plowing had piled up against the car.

So when you finally finished, there's this open space that's going to be left when you move your car out, created by mixing your labor with the snow, as the classical labor theory of value economists & John Locke might have said. So you have a moral right to that space, which may be secured by placing beach chairs or garbage cans in the space.

And if you come back and find that someone has taken it, well, that's what quarters are for, and keys, isn't it?

This was mainly an issue in the biggest storms, when it would take a couple-three days to get the plowing done, the first rounds would just be keeping the traffic lanes clear, then there would be alternate side of the street no-parking to allow plowing, even numbered days no parking on the right, odd numbered none on the left, or vice versa -- and also an issue in the smaller streets that didn't get plowed as much or more than once.

Blizzards usually happened not too many degrees below freezing. Anything below 25 degrees usually meant high pressure and clear skies. So the worst thing for driving and parking was when you'd get snow, then it would partly melt, but then refreeze during the night and stay cold. Then you could get slush turned into ice ridges that were almost as bad as driving on a tertiary "road" in Swaziland (a comparison I only gained much later), and cleared parking spaces were hot property indeed.

Interesting, Chris.

So, if I might synthesize your observations with those of the author I cited... might a reasonable hypothesis be that Snow Day rituals are not universal even on the East Coast but that where they are practiced there is a high degree of uniformity in terms of the rituals being followed?

LOL - I love it, Miles. I'm sure my retired highschool teacher father would too.

Seems reasonable Kevin. If you think about widespread children's games & songs, & regional variations of them, they seem to work that way. Their reproduction over generations has always fascinated me.

Yeah, the apparent multi-generational aspect of this story fascinated me too. On the NPR show a Mom called in to relate how all five of her kids follow the ritual and that each child took it upon him/herself to pass it on to the next oldest child as they came of age sufficient to participate. The Mom was clearly amused by the whole thing and actively participated. She didn't actually say that she'd passed it to them. But from the way she was talking it sure seemed like that had to have been what happened.