@Jake65 @Sir Derf : Being a Northern Hemisphere type, I often wonder what it's like to have Christmas in warm rather than cold weather - are the cards, marketing etc. themed around snow scenes as they are here, or do Santa & Rudolph spend more time on the beach than in blizzards...?!
And now I'm off on a nostalgia trip... the weather lately reminds me of being a child in the 1970s, living in a house out in the countryside (where it's colder than my [now] home city's +2-4 °C micro-climate) which was optimistically built - far from any gas main - with oil-fired central heating, before the [first notable] Oil Crisis made THAT a supremely bad idea which reduced to a memory the Winter visits from the lorries which used to come and refill the huge free-standing oil tanks behind the houses in our neighbourhood... and when double glazing wasn't generally around in the UK, either. We'd wake up in the mornings to find our parents laying towels along the bedroom window-sills to soak up the melting ice which had formed on the inside of the glass overnight, before they'd forge out into the Arctic morning to start up both their cars (we were miles from most places!) and let them idle for 20 minutes or so while the dashboard heaters melted the ice on the
outside of their windows!
I remember the entire street doing likewise... a long row of parked cars, sending plumes of exhaust vapour into the equally misty frosty mornings - and then all joining the traffic into the nearby city where work & school happened, with those same vapour-plumes still going all the way.
But at least the annual 3-month freeze-fest made us pretty hardy - and as you've reminded me,
@Herodite, those Winter months also made our nightly hot-water bottles a most welcome and fondly remembered ritual, too! In fact, I've always bought them for my kids, too, even though my view in their case was that while 'hardy' is certainly a useful trait, 'warm and toasty' is a much preferable situation in which to send one's little ones to bed, given the choice - and one of my girls, in particular, still uses and loves her pink fluffy hot-bottle even now, into her late teens...
For the same reason of kiddie-warmliness, I used to run our [double-glazed] home's central heating full blast 24/7 from October to March, too... before our own recent modern gas crisis put a rather abrupt stop to all that, at least for now...
plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, hm?
Of course, if we have any players amongst us from further N. into the European Hemisphere than I am - or maybe Canadians, or Alaskans? - then for sure my nostalgic recollection of what constitutes a cold Winter will be scoffed into next week (and back). I remember the old jokes, back when the Net was young, and for the first time people could actually talk - well, type - to others from the all over the world, without paying a small fortune in phone bills... especially one well-known text document which used to circulate by email, with a series of ironic statements that began [something like] "When Canadians put on a T-shirt, Floridians put on jumpers, hats, scarves, and overcoats", and ended with [something like] "When Canadians put on a coat, Floridians cease to exist". It was obviously an in-joke between North Americans, but still, we N. & S. Europeans could also relate...!
Well, THIS went off-topic fast. Blame the tail-end of my whole family's recent attack of C-19-straight-into-'flu, with an on-off fever of 105 °F or so, for this departure into
L. Loquax-style rambling, although (er, I think?) I'm making
somewhat more sense now than I have done of late...!
... at least our family's managed to get the inevitable lurgy out of the way, this year, before The Big Day arrives, whether it bring us sunshine or snow!