McMullen: Mild winter not something we've earned

For some reason, winter seems to inspire flights of fancy more often than the other seasons.

When a thick layer of ice on the windshield delays our morning commute for a few minutes, some of us playfully curse the name of Jack Frost, winter’s omnipresent foot soldier. During a snowstorm we angrily shake our fists skyward in the vain hope that our ire might reach Old Man Winter himself and dissuade him from inconveniencing us further.

Residents of Michigan’s upper peninsula attempt to curry the favor of their very own winter deity, Heikki Lunta, through songs and business signage. The English translation of the name, Hank Snow, sounds rather mundane in comparison and conjures images of either a Canadian-American country singer or a guy who sits at an ice desk all day and fills out the snow invoices necessary to facilitate a typical winter weather season.

Now, Mr. Lunta’s jurisdiction doesn’t typically extend this far south, but right here in mid-Missouri it seems that the less-regional winter personifications just haven’t been showing up to work all that often.

People in the Midwest and Northeast all like to yell about the annual ongoing “Snowmagedden” or “Snowopocalypse” that everyone else just calls winter, but we haven’t heard a peep of it here on the edge of the Kansas City media market.

To put it simply: Here in Sedalia and Pettis County, our winter has been downright mild and snow accumulation has been rare. We’ve gotten more rain than snow and we can actually see the grass on the ground. More than that, some of the grass is actually living. It is a strange and wondrous thing,

And no, I don’t think I’m risking “jinxing” anything by mentioning that. I don’t think that I am welcoming the vengeance of any mythical freeze beings by taunting them. As far as I’m concerned, Messrs. Frost, Winter and Snow can all consider this an open challenge, if they’re out there.

And if there were some sort of nega-Jack Frost who went around using his warm breath to prevent things from freezing over, he would be feeling particularly appreciated because the people are loving it loudly. It’s hard to have a conversation without someone bringing up how nice it is outside.

But one of the most interesting conclusions to come out of this mundane cold season is the idea that we deserve weather like this. From meteorologists to mere men, the prevailing thought seems to be that we have been finally been gifted this pleasantness to make up for the absolutely awful winters we’ve been having the past few years.

But I don’t know about all that. That seems to suppose some sort of scenario where there really is a white-clad figurehead that is in charge of this winter thing who stroked his chin and decided that we humans deserved a break. It’s like the weather has sentience — and even more than that, the capacity for mercy.

But the main point is this: the winter weather seasons of the past decade really haven’t been that bad. Sure, last year there was the snow that shut down Sedalia and before that there was the severe ice storm that covered every surface it could find, but even when you take all that into consideration, we’ve still had much better cold seasons than we could have had.

We’ve actually been having some of the nicest winters of any of the states within the “humid continental” climate region that includes the top-right corner of the United States and some of southern Canada.

In places such as Minnesota, Maine, Massachusetts and the Dakotas, they would salivate over the winters that we have. There are states where the snow falls almost constantly for at least 1/3 of any given year. Winter can hit hard but it doesn’t do it day after day and year after year. We’ve had it pretty easy, outside of a couple of anomalies.

We should enjoy the nice weather but we should hardly act as though we deserve it.