We have fetishised snow- creating an elaborate commercially driven 
fantasy of the snowy Christmas at exactly the time that snow is 
disappearing from the European winter. Ersatz snow- spray snow from a 
can, polystyrene snow, computer generated snow- appears on every shop 
front, in every tv advert, on people’s windows and front doors, across 
the mastheads of magazines and newspapers, on every Christmas card. 
Increasingly there is machine generated snow on the ski slopes where 
snow is actually supposed to be.

And there is not so much as a single snow flake in sight. This is set to 
be the warmest English winter on record. The autumn of 2006 has been 
nearly one degree hotter on average than the autumn of 2005, itself the 
hottest ever recorded. Even the experts are shocked If these 
temperatures persist there will be no snow at all across most of England 
this winter.

The prognosis is clear. Assuming that the there is no collapse of the 
Gulf Stream, within one generation low land Western Europe will become 
permanently devoid of snow.

We’re virtually there already in southern England. The number of days of 
snow has fallen by two thirds during my lifetime. The heaviest snowfall 
my children have experienced in their five years of life is one inch 
three years ago. Since then there has been hardly enough to speckle the 
path.

And yet kids occupy a media generated world of constant blizzards, 
snowball fights and snowmen. This morning my children sat and watched a 
Christmas special of Bob the Builder set in two feet of snow, introduced 
by presenters surrounded by spray-on snow. They were inspired to build 
their own snowman fetish out of a white blanket thrown over a chair with 
stick on eyes and a carrot for a nose- just like they’d been told by the 
snow cult. It was cute, but painful too.

Snow has always been a component of the image of Christmas in both the 
traditional pagan/Christian festival and the more recent consumerist 
potlatch. What is interesting is not just that it persists in the face 
of a marked change in actual climate, but that its promotion and 
commodification is becoming even stronger. It has taken on a socially 
constructed meaning that exceeds any intrinsic meaning; a fetish, in 
other words.

Humans have a marked historical tendency to fetishise the natural world 
as they destroy it. Look at the recent spate of penguin fever as 
discussed by Martyn Carless in the last posting. Think of the national 
symbols that live on long after their prototypes have been virtually 
eliminated – the cedars of Lebanon, the Bald Eagle of the US, the tigers 
of Korea, the Aracaria tree of Chile, and there are many more.

What is also happening here is a deliberate rejection of the very rapid 
changes that are happening around us. Snow has taken on a life of its 
own in our constructed reality as a symbol of stability and tradition. 
The loss of snow is one of the harbingers of climate change and it is 
precisely for that reason that our collective response is to ignore it.

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