The Golden Snowball #ThursdayTreeLove

Having grown up in the Northeast United States, the concept of someone never having seen snow is a little hard to imagine.  Snow has been a part of my life for all but two years of my seventy or so years on this planet (years I lived in Florida).

I have two first cousins who are natives of Florida, a state which rarely sees snow. They've lived most of their lives in Florida and still live there.  Even they have seen snow - one, when he lived for a time in my native New York State, and the other, because for a while she enjoyed the sport of snow skiing and would travel to places that (obviously) had snow.

But my blog has some readers who either have never seen snow in person, or had to travel distances just to see it.  They look forward to my pictures of snow and trees and I'm normally happy to oblige.

I can understand (I think) their love of snow pictures.   There's just something about snow that makes everything pretty, at least at first. But this year snow has played hard to get - until now.  So, finally:

(These pictures were taken Monday - we have more snow now.)

OK, it's a bush, but I'll call it a short tree.

Stretch to the sky!

You'll note all these trees and bushes are still green.  Not all our trees here lose their leaves and sleep through the winter.  These evergreens have narrow, needle like leaves coated in a wax, and have air pockets in their outer bark instead of liquid like many of our other trees do, so they can survive our winter without going through full dormancy (they are partially dormant).

Here's more on the science of winter survival of trees in our climate.

We've had two snowfalls this week (none major) and we have snow on the ground once again.  It's about to get a lot colder, too.

Which brings me to something called the Golden Snowball, a friendly competition between five cities in New York State for the most snowfall each year.   We here in the Binghamton, New York area don't win it too often - since I've lived here, only twice.  

If you go to the website I've linked to earlier in this paragraph, you can see there are some major totals so far for this winter (especially for Buffalo, which was paralyzed by an epic snowstorm last December.  To paralyze Buffalo with snow takes a lot of doing by Nature.)

Buffalo, officially, has 105 inches (that's 266.7 cm) of snow this year.  They are also noted for originating Buffalo style chicken wings. 

We in the Binghamton area average about 86 inches (218 cm) of snow in a year.  We are way behind this year so far.   (Our food?  Spiedies.)

Buffalo's going to win the 2022-23 Golden Snowball, I suspect.  As far as I'm concerned, they are welcome to the award.

Do you like snow? Hate it? Or: Are you someone who has never seen snow except in photos and movies?

Joining Parul at Happiness and Food for #ThursdayTreeLove.