It always seems to me that winter could possibly be a nice season, as long as I leave Grand Forks before January and don’t come back until April.

Seriously though, Christmas isn’t right without snow. I can’t imagine living in a place where December 25th isn’t filled with hot cocoa and sledding and the crunching of boots on the ground.

There’s something magical and fresh about a light snowfall. When the sun glitters off the millions of flakes, it’s really beautiful.

That is, until you add to that picture, thousands of college students comically falling down left and right, all over campus for months at a time. There is big a difference between winter as a kid, when snow pants and all that jazz makes for amazing recesses, and winter as a college student, when academia takes precedence over sledding.

I just wish that campus was more accommodating and that the staff would look at the weather forecasts from the past 100 years and realize that maybe more practical infrastructure should be implemented. I believe UND used to have more underground tunnels in the section of campus near O’Kelly, before the flood in 1997 made them unusable. Unfortunately, they have not been restored, so we are all stuck out in the cold, slipping on the ice.

Oh, I almost forgot about the skyways! But that’s probably because I have never actually used one. They are nice for aviation students and those residence halls they connect, but otherwise they just make for expensive and impractical decorations.

I know I sound cynical, but the lack of parking on campus is also a nightmare- don’t even get me started on that topic. Walking to Merrifield from the Ralph every day in the frigid and windy winter does not make me the biggest fan of UND’s choices regarding money allocation.

Putting that rant aside, and ending on a happier note, what I’m really trying to say is that snow can be pretty, Christmas is coming soon, and the semester is almost over.

I also just found out that I’m going to Austria for three weeks this summer… so life is looking up! Keep taking your zinc and Echinacea, people, and we just might make it through the semester.