Snow fell in parts of the Deep South (in the US) last week, for the first time in several years in many places.
If you were an older child, a teenager, or an adult the first time you saw snow, please tell us about it here in this thread. What were your thoughts? Did you play in it? Hope it would go away? Stare at it in awe?
I was brought up in New Jersey, where we get plenty of snow. But the New Girl in high school (whose last name, like mine, was at the end of the alphabet, so we were always placed near each other in classes) was from California, and the first time it snowed – wispy, thin light stuff that barely even accumulated – she couldn’t help staring out the window at the way it was coming down diagonally in wind-blown streams.
“It’s so beautiful!” she said, unable to pay attention to anything else.
It was very uncharacteristic of her driven, Type A personality.
We’re still in touch. After living not far from me for many years, she’s now back in southern California.
It snowed in New Orleans when I was two. I have no memory of that event. No more snow at all for the next 16 years.
When I was 18, I was home from college at my parents’ house in suburban New Orleans. It snowed lightly a few days before Christmas. I didn’t get to see the snow falling – but when I went outside, I saw the dusting over everyone’s lawns. It was pretty, but not “magical”. I had never really navigated an icy sidewalk before, so I came close to busting my butt a few times just running out to get the mail.
I saw a real snowfall several times throughout January 2001 when I was living/working in Jackson, MS (3 hrs north of New Orleans). It was pretty, but still not magical. I walked our dog through maybe an inch of snow a few times, it was cool to feel it crunching and sliding around underfoot. I had some interesting events driving/sliding over ice, even in parking lots. I learned what “black ice” was living in Jackson – I still remember doing a completely inadvertent lane change on I-55 thanks to black ice. It just slid my car leftward about 15 feet with no noticeable loss of forward momentum.
I had expected to see more snow in Jackson after that first winter up there, but no. Snow wasn’t a regular thing up there either, apparently.
The first “magical” snowfall for me was Christmas 2004 back in metro New Orleans, when my daughter was 19 months old. We were with family, and my daughter was bundled up in her red wool coat. Everybody went outside to catch snowflakes and watch the lawns go (mostly) white. I’d call it a very heavy dusting – a little bit of grass poked through here and there through the snow. Anyway, watching the kids – and adults – play in that snowfall was great fun and really added to our Christmas experience that year.
We had a surprise snow in New Orleans in December 2008. It was bitter cold (for us, probably high 20s F), but precipitation wasn’t expected IIRC. So it started snowing one morning when everyone was in the building for work. The nearby office buildings all mostly emptied out as adults took to the streets to experience what was probably just snow flurries to Northerners. There was no real snow collection anywhere … it seemed to melt as it hit the ground. I found out later that my kids’ schools had let everyone out into their yards for an impromptu recess to experience the snow. That snowfall actually was kinda magical for some reason … maybe because it came by surprise and turned so many adults into little kids for a short time.
I was born and still live in Houston. I’m told it was snowing the day I was born. The first time I can recall snow, I guess I was about 9 or 10.
I grew up in Cape Town, South Africa and snow was extremely rare. I don’t think we ever had any at our house. But we did hike Table Mountain weekly, which is the first time I ever saw snow. A tiny amount that never stuck to the ground, but still exciting at the time.
That was only once, and I was living in Atlanta before I saw it again, this time actually covering the ground. Here in Bellevue we’ve had a number of actual snowfalls at the house (maybe one or two a year), but we’re close enough to the mountains for real, deep snowfall (along with skiiing) to be an easy day trip.
I had seen snow before but there was never much and it didn’t stay around long.
Then one day my father was watching the Chicago Bears play on TV. There were big white mounds around the edges of the field. My father explained that’s how they piled the snow to get the field playable.
It was November. I couldn’t understand how it could snow anywhere in November, much less so much they had to pile it up.
Los Angeles, sometime over the 1957-1958 winter. I remember Dad calling out to us and we all went over to the window to watch the flakes come down.
It didn’t stick, of course.
Having grown up in middle GA, it is not so rare that it only happens every few years, but more than once per year is definitely rare. So I do not recall then first time I remember it snowing. But I defintely remember most of the times it has snowed.
This past weekend, we got over 8 inches in our yard. That was rare due to the amount as well as it being so early. It has snowed a couple of times on Christmas, but I don’t recall it ever snowing this early.
Three years ago, I was at work and it started snowing that morning. I did not think anything of it and kept working. My boss said, every one could go home, so I got in the car to leave. When I got outside it was sticking to the road and that was rare. It took me hours to drive 2 miles down the road and I stopped and got gas, then continued. I was on the road for 8 hours to get 10 miles, and ended up stuck on an on ramp and spent the night in my car. It took me 24 hours from the time I left work to get home. That is not something I ever wish to repeat.
When I was a kid, we sledded and built snowmen and threw snowballs. It was magical.
As an adult, it is just something to watch.
A couple of years ago, my wife and oldest daughter and I were drving from Atlanta to WV to join our youth group for a ski trip. We had left several hours after them and ran into snow about TN. It steadily got worse and we were driving in blizzard conditions. I could not see the road, I could not see tracks from the semi in front of us. I could not see the semi in front of us. I was driving our SUV at snail’s pace. This southern boy was definitely out of his element. But we were not sliding and it was moving on and something I hope I never am faced with again.
I don’t know how old I was, maybe 4 or 5? But we would go up to the mountains in the winter to visit the snow. Then come down and play on the lawn in our jeans & tshirts. Southern CA, 70’s.
I’ve seen snow as far back as I remember, but what I remember most is the “Great Blizzard of 1950.” It started on Thanksgiving Day and continued for several days. We lived on an out-of-the-way side street in a sparsely populated suburb. The plows kept piling up snow along the curb, and eventually there was 6 feet of snow piled up. So all the kids climbed up to the top and slid down to the street. I was 5 at the time, and remember seeing a huge drift up to my bedroom window on the second floor.
I grew up in the tropics. When I did my typical Aussie gap year Europe trip, at one point I stayed with some family friends in a village in Co Durham in northern England. It was unseasonably cold (I think it was Oct or Nov) and it snowed a bit. I liked it, watched it coming down through the kitchen window with many cups of tea, then bundled up in borrowed warm clothes and went for a country walk. There were tilled fields on one side of the lane, and pastures on the other. Then I had an odd sensory experience, like an optical illusion: the black black soil, contrasting with the white white snow, gave the impression that the black things were green, and white things were red. I tried to explain what I was seeing to my friends, but they thought I was high/insane 
Just as a wild guess, I’d say at least half the people in the world have never seen snow.
Where I grew up snow was uncommon but not rare. It might snow for a couple of days most years. Often it didn’t stick and when it did it melted quickly. One year we had an especially rough winter with major snow storms for several weeks. We were not equipped for it in the least. That year, we had so many snow days from school that there was talk of extending the school year. Unfortunately, I don’t recall the first time I saw snow.
In Upstate New York, I don’t remember it — I was 4, my sister 3, and my brother 2. My parents said they were awakened that Saturday morning by a phone call from the lady across the street who said, “Did you know your children are out front, and playing in the snow in their pajamas?”
Kids. They don’t get cold.
I grew up on the beach in Southern California.
“Seeing snow” was common on TV and on the 40-60 mile distant mountaintops every winter.
I think the OP really means “touching snow or seeing it fall firsthand.”
For me that was in college. We “drove up to the snow” as the local saying has it. Finding a park or other public place to try to play in it. It was colder and wetter than I’d hoped. Not at all like the fake snow you see in commercials hanging on pretty girl’s clothing. The melting, wetting, soaking part is snow’s worst feature by far. Though the cold is not far behind.
I was pretty disappointed in the stuff. I hadn’t expected much good and it was much worse than that.
20 years of living in it and 40 years of working in it have done nothing to improve my attitude towards it. It’s vital to the ecology of the planet and I’m glad it exists. So are the oceans and nobody is trying to live in the middle of those things. So why does anyone try to live where snow is? I can understand the Eskimos who could have walked for a lifetime and not gotten out of it; they didn’t know it wasn’t everywhere. But nowadays everybody knows better. What’s with you people? 
In person as opposed to, say, from an airplane window or far in the distance on a mountaintop, it was in 2011, 5400 meters up in the Khardung La pass on the Indian Himalayas.
Not too shabby for a first, I’d say.
I was born in Australia (no snow whatsoever), and moved to the US when I was six. We arrived in Minneapolis in the dead of winter (snow everywhere). I don’t actually remember it but apparently my brother and I ran around in circles, yelling “Snow! Snow!” and throwing handfuls of snow at each other. I do remember being shown how to make snow angels, which I thought were so cool.
Grew up in FLA but the family moved to NOVA in 73 and we lived on Bull Run MT. It snowed the first winter very hard one day and we had a few inches of very wet snow. We went out to play and it warmed up so fast it all melted way too quick. We were all disappointed. But I stayed in VA while everyone else eventually moved back to FLA so I get to see plenty of snow now.
I spent years 4 to 7 of my life living in Limassol, Cyprus - I remember a number of events from England before we moved out there, but don’t recall snow.
My first experience of snow was when we drove up to Mount Olympus where we were travelling along cleared roads between walls of snow that towered over the car. I think it might have been Boxing day. We spent a the morning building snowmen, throwing snowballs and getting very cold (up a mountain in winter, but also, we had no proper winter clothing), then we drove back home and spent the afternoon on the beach.
I’d seen snow in the distance, on mountains near Cape Town, many times growing up. But the closest I came to it locally was hailstorms where the hailstones were tiny and also numerous enough to be piled into drifts. I kind of thought real snow would be like that.
I first experienced real snow on honeymoon in the UK (in April '99), when we got brief flurries while in Snowdonia (of course!) in Wales - I caught a flake on my tongue, but there wasn’t enough to make even a golf-ball-sized snowball in the whole of Harlech Castle carpark, so it was just a nice weather thing that happened, like a rainbow.
I first really experienced snow a few years ago in Finland and Estonia - thick enough to make snow angels and snowmen on the hotel balcony and the ferry decks.
I love snow, I would move to a place with regular winter snow in a heartbeat if it ever came up. I loved tramping through it, the way it felt as i packed it down in my hand, the way it near-instantly covered the landscape and renders it a magical Otherland.