It’s been really hard to get into the holiday spirit this year.

You see, here up in the Great White Nort’ (which is almost up in the Great White North, and usually only distinguishable by the last ‘h’) there’s supposed to be this stuff on the ground called “snow”. It starts falling in early December, or sometimes even November, and covers all the dead leaves and brown grass and plastic toys your neighbors’ kids left out and makes everything pretty and sparkly and white. It coats your apartment’s balcony railing and enhances the festive garland and multicolored lights you strung there between bastings of the Thanksgiving turkey. Even though it’s cold and it drifts and likes to blow down the front of your shirt, there’s just something about snow that makes this dead season a little more tolerable.

That is, when we have some.

The deplorable lack of white stuff this season almost - almost - has me believing in global warming. Add in the fact that I was able to wear a tank top on my birthday, and sit on the aforementioned balcony in shorts and bare feet on Thanksgiving day, and I’m starting to seriously wonder if America’s fascination with huge SUVs and Mexican food is truly having a detrimental effect on the environment. Because the only snowflakes we’ve seen since December first have been the cheap plastic ones local businesses have hanging in their windows. Yep. It hasn’t snowed since December first, when 2½ inches fell and melted ten days later. And although I’ve appreciated the clean, dry roads and temperatures that don’t freeze your boogers when you go outside and take a deep breath, this vista of brown and gray and black has done absolutely nothing to make me feel all Christmas-y and merry.

I tried to jump-start the season by buying the Trans-Siberian Orchestra’s “Christmas Eve and Other Stories”. We laughed ourselves silly again with our yearly viewing of “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation”. We cried at the end of “It’s a Wonderful Life”. We played carols and baked treats and received cards from our extended families. We tried. We really tried.

But I never had the energy to put up our Christmas tree. I waited until the last minute to shop. I didn’t even knit gifts for anyone. I just wasn’t in the mood. It just didn’t feel like Christmas.

And now the New Year is coming. I know I should be glad about that, even do a joyful little dance around the kitchen to the strains of KC and the Sunshine Band. And, considering all of the crap that went down in my own personal 2006, I may just do that. I’ll say goodbye to the year of decapitated birds, the sex offender downstairs, the apartment fire next door, the hailstorm from hell, the changing-of-the-job, the near-purse-snatching, jury duty, and the electricity going out while I was in the shower. 2006, I wash my hands of you. Then I’ll wash them again, because a warehouse full of copiers is a dirty place.

Only one and a half days of this miserable year left, and then we can inject it with a lethal dose and put it down humanely. And I can take a deep breath, and wonder what 2007 will bring.

And it will be so warm, my boogers won’t even freeze.