My son wakes up and bounds under our duvet, joining his sister who’s been purring on my wife’s chest for the past few hours. We’ve been waiting for this, and not merely because our body clocks have long since primed us for his early morning invasion of our bed and we now automatically wake up about five minutes before it happens each day. No, mainly it’s because we know something he doesn’t; that it’s been snowing – actual proper snowing – all night.
‘Go to the window,’ we say, like reprehensibly twee parents from a Victorian children’s book. He clambers to the curtains, pulling them back and taking in the view like a stunned Dickensian waif.
‘SNOW,’ he screams, eyes wide as tax discs. Soon he’s running out of the room. ‘It’s been snowing in the garden, too!’ he yells seconds later from the back bedroom, confirming that this meteorological event was not confined to the pavement in front of our house. Ten minutes later, we get a text saying the school will be closed, followed by a flurry of messages from pals asking if we want to go frolic in the park. We quickly realise we have almost no snow-appropriate clothing for either child, which rather hits home how unusually magical this situation is to us.
Considering how little snow I’ve actually encountered in my life, it’s weird that it’s such a recurrent trope at this time of year. As always, you see this in others before you do so in yourself. As a kid, I used to watch Christmas episodes of Home & Away and my mind would strain to work out how they could be in the middle of the hottest part of their year and yet still use winter symbolism like furry Santa suits, sleighs, reindeer and fake snow in festive decorations. It took a bit longer for me to realise that we used the very same snowy tropes everywhere in Derry which, despite being a very cold part of Ireland’s North Atlantic coast, had only really gifted me proper, lying, build-a-snowman-and-attack-your-parents-with-snowballs snow maybe once every two years, and almost never particularly close to Christmas itself. It was many years later I twigged that the nativity dioramasI’d grown up looking at throughout my Catholic education – donkeys and wise men huddling near snowy mangers, olive trees coated with crisp white powder, sheltering camels braving the harshness of glistening ice crystals – rather overstated the preponderance of snowfall in the little desert town of Bethlehem.
There’s no time to point any of this out to my son as he is bounding toward his wellies and adding layers like a man possessed. This is a surprise, as he ordinarily resists clothing like a 70s-era Oliver Reed. Storming outside, dressed as haphazardly as a snowman, he greets the world with joy, skidding to each hedge and bin and marvelling at the white wonderland in front of him, when splat. He’s fallen on his face on to a bin bag of compacted ice. ‘This is yucky,’ he says, as we march him, ashen-faced, back indoors to change clothes. What a sham, I think. The residents of Summer Bay don’t have to put up with this.
Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? by Séamas O’Reilly is out now (Little, Brown, £16.99). Buy a copy from guardianbookshop at £14.78
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