Merry Christmas...and a Late Snowfall

---

27th December 2005.
Godalming, Surrey, England.

Merry Christmas to all back home. Though I can't really disclose particular details on my client's family or how my Christmas with them went, I did enjoy it for the most part. My client didn't get ill and I was surrounded by lovely people; life was good.

All in all there have been nineteen people spending some part of their Christmas here. Some stayed Christmas Eve and some Christmas night, but all were here Christmas day so it was a bit of a madhouse. I was given VIP treatment and had to literally argue my way into the kitchen to help out whenever I felt at a loss of things to do. Everybody got along and I know the whole family by now, so it was not as distressing as I thought a Christmas on the other side of the world might be. Which is not to say that there were no teary phonecalls home; there were. But I was not unhappy.

One minuscule blight upon the day was the lack of snow. I'd kept a vigilant eye on the skies in the weeks prior, and with a sinking heart realised that this was not my year for a white Christmas. We've often had something called frosts in the mornings, a phenomenon which is not dissimilar to a heavy frozen dew and which is actually pretty cool, excuse the pun. The grass crunches beneath your feet like potato crisps and everything with an exposed surface is crystalline. But it's just not the same thing as a lovely, story-book White Christmas.

Comforted only by the assurety that my New Year's break in Scotland would surely involve snow, it was a pleasant surprise to realise this morning (the 27th) that something peculiar was falling slowly past the windows. Snow!! Oh, joy!

I ran out into my first ever snowfall and spent a good hour or so experiencing and photographing that. It was fantastic! Like tiny frozen dancing confetti drifting ever-so-gently from the skies to blanket the ground in a light layer of white. There wasn't enough, having been a fairly light fall, to make a snowman or anything along that line of clichès, and I didn't have the time to make snow angels before I had to return to my client, but it was nonetheless a magical day for me. And surely the 27th still counts as part of the Christmas period!?!? So it was a White Christmas after all!?!

---