By Juliana Vasquez | Staff Writer
I have a love-hate relationship with cold weather. As a spring chicken, I yearn for the later spring months, when flowers bloom, the sun turns scorching and everyone starts complaining about Texas humidity.
Still, I have always much preferred the burning summer months to the dreary winter ones. Being from South Texas, my memories of winter are drab at best. The world turns gray, the wind grows unforgiving and almost everything dies. Winter in Texas doesn’t typically arrive until late January, meaning we miss out on the joys of a white Christmas, trading Christmas sweaters for bikinis and Christmas Day pool parties.
The romanticized winter dream — heaps of snow, thick sweaters and frozen lakes — was only accessible to me through a TikTok video or a Pinterest board. To top it all off, my family prefers beach vacations to ski trips, trading ski resorts for all-inclusive Latin American hotels.
The three times it has snowed in Texas — at least that I remember — were magical yet forgettable. It was the kind of snow you could enjoy for five minutes before going inside to complain about its inconvenience. The first time, I was a toddler and cried as soon as my parents placed me onto the ice sheet that passes for Texas snow. The second, it turned to sludge by noon of the same day it fell. The third resulted in my family losing power for a week.
The gloom of winter, combined with my inherited disdain for the cold, convinced me January and February were the worst weather months of the year.
Last year, as I experienced my first real winter with real snow in the mountains of Washington state, my outlook changed. Texas snow is more ice or sludge than anything else, not the type of pillowy substance described in books. This snow, however, was exactly how I imagined it should be. You could fall into it, like freshly sifted powder. Snowballs were soft and painless; snowmen were easy to craft.
Lying in real snow, I began to understand why some people claim winter as their favorite season. As I explored further, I couldn’t help but wonder if I had misjudged the season altogether.
My friends and I drank hot apple cider outside while eating bratwurst and sauerkraut, the warmth of the food cutting through the cold air. We sipped hot chocolate and admired the Christmas lights, even though the new year had already begun.
As the season progressed, I found joy in winter’s simple moments: escaping the cold to a heated room, drinking hot chocolate topped with whipped cream, marshmallows and peppermint in hand-painted mugs. I watched comfort movies, hoping class would be canceled.
Although winter is identified by its harshness, many forget to remember the warmth that encapsulates it — a warmth not found in any other season. It exists in small moments, like warm hugs, warm mugs and warm encounters.
This winter, I’m not dreading the cold fronts as much as I used to. Even as ice that we call snow covered the ground in Waco Saturday night, I felt the warmth.
