Spring Time in December

The Christmas trees are up and decorated, the houses and trees are lit up nightly, and the stockings have been hung by the fireplace with care. The malls are jammed with stressed out shoppers, the lucky few have already bought and wrapped their gifts, and the college football bowl season is underway. Yes, it’s beginning to look a lot like…spring time?

Here in the Northeast, it certainly doesn’t seem like it’s the end of December this year. It actually feels more like spring than winter. Daytime temperatures have been in the high-40’s to mid-50’s, instead of the 30’s. It’s even gotten up to 60 degrees around here! For those that use the Celsius scale, that would be temperatures in the 7 – 15 range. In December! While it has gotten cold a few days, I’ve worn my winter jacket only about 5 times this year. And instead of snow on the ground, the grass is still green. It looks like we’re not going to have a white Christmas this year.

As an adult getting along in years, this really doesn’t bother me. I don’t need to drag out the snow blower or shovel the driveway to be able to go somewhere. I don’t even need to scrape frost off the car windows on the majority of mornings. I don’t need to bundle up to just get the mail from the mailbox and I don’t shiver through the first 10 minutes of my daily commute to and from work. If this is the result of global warming, then bring it on because I could get used to winters like this.

As a kid, however, I would have been going out of my mind, maybe even devastated. Winter break from school would be coming up and there’d be nothing to look forward to. There would be no way we’d be playing ice hockey at the pond from early morning to the time darkness made it impossible to see the black puck any longer. The only pause in the games would be enough time to go home and eat some lunch and slightly thaw out the feet and hands. If it wasn’t cold enough to freeze the ponds, there would be no way we’d be spending most of the day sledding down the big hill in the back of my house, punctuated by a hot chocolate break and finishing up warming next to a roaring fire, because there wouldn’t be any snow.

Sure, we would have found stuff to do. We would have probably played street hockey for a few hours, perhaps switched over to football since the grass wouldn’t have been rock hard, and maybe even rode our bikes somewhere since it wouldn’t have been so cold. But it wouldn’t have been the same. Winter break from school was meant to be spent freezing our little behinds off, doing stuff in the snow or on the ice – and we liked it that way! I don’t remember any of us even hinting that it was too cold to go outside during our time off from school in December.

I have no shame in saying that I’m enjoying the holiday season so far. I don’t need a pile of snow and below zero temperatures to feel the joy of the season, and I certainly don’t need to get numb by running out to the mailbox to know that Santa is on his way. This year, I’m dreaming of a green Christmas. Let it rain, let it rain, let it rain!

Happy Holidays and Happy New Year!

A Penny Found

I went into the men’s room at work last week and as I went to do my thing, I noticed there was a penny in the urinal. It didn’t disturb me or gross me out, but it did make me stop and think. My thought process went something like this:

“Why would anybody drop a penny into the urinal?”

“Is this supposed to be funny? Because if it is, I don’t really see the humor.”

“Is this supposed to tick off the cleaning crew because they’ll have to get the penny out?”

“Is someone going to check every so often and see if the penny is still there?”

“Why would anybody drop a penny into the urinal?”

By then I was about finished what I had gone in for and probably thought a little too much about it. Here’s the sad part about all this: I’ve looked in that urinal every day since, just to see if it was still there. For those of you who can’t stand the suspense, the penny is still there, with poor Abe lying face down at the bottom. It bothered me that the penny was still there after more than a week, not because someone is wasting money (hey, it’s only a penny), not because no one is removing said penny from the place where us men relieve ourselves, but because I couldn’t figure out why it was there in the first place.

So I did what most people do today, I Googled 'penny in a urinal'. To my surprise, there is a game people play with pennies and urinals. It used to be that people left it on the urinal and would see how long it took for someone else to take it. Then people started putting the penny in the urinal. I can pretty much guarantee that the penny in the urinal doesn’t get taken anywhere near as much as the penny on the urinal. Go ahead, Google it yourself and see what you find.

The whole coin in the water got me thinking about the library in the town I grew up in. No, people didn’t leave pennies in the toilets or urinals at the library, but they did have an area with fish swimming around, not a fish tank, but a mini-pond in the middle of the library. People used to throw coins of all denominations in there and it was very tempting as a kid to reach in and grab some change. It still looks pretty much the same today:

My wife has confessed that as a kid, she occasionally reached in and grabbed some change. And as I mentioned in this post, back in those days a quarter was all you needed to get a soda and a candy bar at the gas station near my house.

I always liked to read, so I’d go to the library with my Mom to get a couple of books. While I was downstairs in the Children’s area choosing my books, Mom was upstairs looking for something for herself. When I was done, and I was always done first, I would go find her and she’d tell me to go sit at a table or in a chair and start reading one of my books. Only I’d go sit by the fish (and the coins) and strategize on how to get me some money. There were two problems, however, that held me back. First, the fish freaked me out. They were big and in my overactive imagination they’d bite into my arm and pull me under the water. Second, there were a lot of adults around and they all seemed to be watching me, like there was a conspiracy to make sure no kid got any of their money. Needless to say, I never even got one penny out of the fish pond.

Needless to say, I’m also not going to get a penny out of a urinal either. At some point it will get taken out by someone. Maybe that’s why some bathrooms include a sign saying “Employees must wash their hands before returning to work.”