As a schoolchild, the period after Thanksgiving always brought about a great deal of anticipation. The excitement was mostly about the holidays, of course, but also about the possibility of the fabled Snow Day. My brother and I would watch the Weather Channel obsessively, watching the movement of the fronts, hoping the blue color that indicated cold would dip down closer to our hometown. Growing up in Alabama, the Snow Day was more of an urban legend than a reality – something we learned about only from books or movies set in more Northern states. In fact, I remember only one time in my childhood when we actually got a snow day. The dusting of flakes left by a freak cold snap wasn’t enough to make a snowball, but it was apparently enough to scare the school district’s bus drivers off the road. It was also cold enough to freeze our pool, so we made the most of our unexpected day at home testing the limits of the ice.
As I watched the children playing in the yard of the peruskoulu behind my Helsinki apartment, I realized that they, too, would never know the pleasure of a snow day. In Finland, if schools closed because of snow, everyone would be homeschooled. Already there is a decent amount of snow on the ground and it’s likely to stick around until March.
Now, I realize that it is actually dangerous for people who don’t regularly deal with ice and snow to drive buses full of children around, and I do feel sort of bad for kids who will never get that thrill of waking up on a dark winter morning and suddenly realizing that actually you can stay in bed. But I also think the snow day phenomenon says something about how Americans and Finns cope with challenging situations. When faced with an unexpected challenge, you can roll over and go back to sleep, or you can just put on your boots and go about your day. After all, as my Finnish friends tell me, there’s no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing.
