Well, another Christmas has come and gone and a nascent New Year lies before us like a predator in the tall grass, and I find myself once again in New Jersey with the prospect of another night full of fireworks and finger food at Justin’s humble abode.  Except this year, or this holiday season at least, has been somewhat superior to those previous for one simple reason: SNOW.  As I type, giant downy flakes are floating past my window and accumulating in a glorious powder upon the earth.  My room (no longer really my room since I moved out) is bathed in that all-pervasive sort of light that comes both from the sky and the reflected glow of the snow.  And, as if that weren’t good enough, there was snow on the ground for Christmas, too.  The last white Christmas I can remember may have been the same Christmas I received a Sega Dreamcast from “Santa,” which should give you a rough estimate of how long its been.

I am particularly appreciative of snow this year since I made the arduous journey northward to exchange a C for a J in state abbreviations, and balmy, ride-your-bike-all-year-round weather for good old Northeast bone-chilling winter.  Surprise, surprise, I didn’t pack enough warm clothing.  But after having missed out on my favorite part of year, fall (particularly the leaves turning), it was really nice of Mommy Nature to grant me a little taste of the New England winters I remember, because, love North Carolina and the ease of warm weather though I may, I didn’t realize how much I like the colder months of the year until I left them behind.

So I departed NC right after work, three days before Christmas and drove until I was low on gas, long after the the sun had set.  I must have crossed the snow-line in the dark because, not until I pulled into a gas station in Virginia did I notice the snow.  I almost fell to my knees and wept.  For a brief moment, I had the thrill of the feeling you get when you step out of a ski lodge into the clean, cold air of the mountain.  Seriously.  It was a religious experience.

And that has sort of set the tone for my brief stay in America’s polar north. This Christmas break has been something of a brief reprieve from the rigors of real world North Carolina, my CR-V, in traveling north, acting more like that fabled DeLorean, depositing me on a seeming island of childhood I thought I had left behind for good.  Not only was the weather in keeping with my rose-colored memories, but my activities as well.  After trying my best for so long to look, walk, talk, and act like an adult for several months, it was a welcome release.

I was home for a scant few hours before it all began.  I arrived mid-morning on the 23rd, and before long I was out in the snow with AJ, looking for a good spot along the train trestle to hide my brother’s Christmas gift (I would later give him the GPS coordinates taped to a brick and wrapped like a present).  That night I tagged along with my brother and his friends as they drove thirty minutes to see Avatar in IMAX 3D, which was one of the most visually enthralling movies I have seen in a long time.  I haven’t felt that engulfed in the spirit of adventure in a movie theater since maybe the first Lord of the Rings or Star Wars Special Edition.  And that was just the first night.

The Return of Kiddom continued as on Christmas I received a much-needed new computer (I can type this blog post without the computer randomly placing the cursor in the middle of the last paragraph resulting in a sentence contained within a single word).  More importantly, this new compy was superior in actually having a graphics card and allowing me to install a Windows partition, which in turn enabled me to play Red Alert 2, one of my favorite video games of years past, and easily the best real-time strategy game ever produced.  I have spent shameful droves of time playing this game in the last week.

To punctuate my RA2 battles, I’ve been running around in the woods with Michael and AJ in search of geocaches, including a particularly epic quest up a forested hillside that prompted many jokes and comparisons to Lord of the Rings and Indiana Jones.  Notable, too, was the finding of a cache in a plastic scull hidden amongst “spooky,” David Lynch, black lodge-esque trees.

When we weren’t looking for treasure in the wood, AJ, Michael, and I found ourselves at Kohl’s as part of AJ’s ongoing quest for clothes to replace those made into nests by mice.  Did we leave Kohl’s with clothes?  Nope.  There was a 50%-off sale on Nerf guns, including this one, so we spent the night chasing each other around my basement, and searching for lost foam darts among my father’s woodworking equipment.  It was the most unbridled childish fun I’ve had in ages.

So despite coming home to a house that has been vigorously remodeled in many places (including my old room), and now resembles only slightly the house I grew up in, I have found a welcome reprieve, if only for a week or so, from calling Germans eight hours a day to talk about poop.