I’m sure that I speak for the vast majority of BSM students when I say that the absolute downpours of snow that we’ve experienced this winter have been quite a blessing in disguise. However you spend them, I think that we can all agree that snow days bring some of winter’s best moments. I present to you: snow days in a nutshell.

The time is 9:53 pm. You had a long day at school, but the word of a potential snowstorm approaching gave you a sense of optimism. You’ve since prayed for a snow day, and that optimism is beginning to fade. As you begin to accept your fate, you get ready for bed, dispiritedly preparing for tomorrow’s day at school. The following moments can only be described as pure bliss. A notification from Snapchat prompts you to check your group chat, where you receive an unexpectedly enthusiastic text from your buddy, informing you that school is called off. The authenticity of this statement is then debated by the rest of the group chat for a few minutes until you receive an email confirming that it is indeed true. Though your friends are fired up as always, it is an understatement to say that a snow day’s meaning has changed through the years.

In our earliest era of school, a snow day suggested actually leaving the house. You’d text your friends via your blue iPod Touch, mapping out a day full of festivities. This usually meant either pond hockey or sledding, followed by the cool mom of your friend group making everyone hot chocolate and frozen pizza. These days continued until the birth of the popular video game Fortnite. All of a sudden, a snow day meant the ability to play Xbox for a concerningly extensive interval of time, interrupted only by trips to the bathroom and food breaks. Though very different from previous snow days, these were some of the best ones. Now, snow days are mediocre at best in comparison to what they used to be. Our youthful desires to play outside are gone, and we are instead left with a mere day break from our crippling sleep schedules. A morning of sleeping in is great and all, but will simply never compare.

You wake up somewhere between noon and 2 pm and scroll TikTok for a while. You continue to tell yourself that you’ll begin your asynchronous work at the next interval of 15 minutes, which ends up aging worse than Macaulay Culkin. Just like that, the time is somehow now creeping into the evening and you have accomplished nothing more than collecting your loot on Clash of Clans and making a couple of Eggo waffles in your toaster. Oddly enough, after an entire day of rest and leisure, you are somehow even more tired than you would be on a regular day. That being said, you once again debate beginning your asynchronous work but end up deciding that your bed sounds pleasing enough to negate the trouble of scrambling to complete your work late. You doze off, praying that mother nature defies the odds and blesses you with another foot of snow as you sleep.