Fifteen years ago was the Thanksgiving Day Snowstorm of 1989--pure magic. You don't usually get the real snowstorms around here until mid or late December. The ocean temperature is still relatively warm, around 50 degrees, and you need wind in exactly the right direction and a cold core of air over Quebec. If the storm center or high pressure system move just a bit and shift the winds to a more onshore direction, the snow will change to rain. It's a tough balance to achieve in November and that's why snow is so rare then.

The night before, as the snow started to fall, my friends and I were in a movie theater watching Back to the Future Part II. Scary.

December 1989 wound up being a bitterly cold month, with daytime temperatures often below 20 (at least in the northern suburbs). But January brought a mild pattern with highs in the 40s and 50s. After two brutally cold Januarys over the last two years, it would be nice to have a mild one again.