Christmas approaches and my disdain for the weather deepens.

Snow is hardly a necessary ingredient to the cherished season, of course.

Family, health and happiness, among other things, are vastly more important.

Probably egg nog, too.

And the Chipmunks’ Christmas song.

Still and all, the holiday seems to me a trifle less special when the ground is bare as dusk falls on Christmas Eve.

I blame my childhood.

I grew up in Stayton, at the edge of the Willamette Valley east of Salem, where a white Christmas is about as likely as a tropical storm.

But after living in Baker City for more than three decades I have much higher expectations.

Snow is no guarantee here on Dec. 25, to be sure.

But the odds are better than even.

Each year along about the 15th of December I start to study the extended weather forecast, perusing computer models and trying to decipher the musings of the meteorologists.

The tidings this year are rather bleak.

After a couple dustings, one on Nov. 17, the first modest storm whitened my yard on Dec. 16.

As I stood beside our Christmas tree and watched the flakes flying thickly outside, I began to feel festive.

But then I consulted the forecast.

And as I read the words and clicked on the maps I imagined not snow-flocked trees on Christmas morning but rather the grotesque grin of the Grinch as he plotted his revenge against the Whos down in Whoville, the tall and the small.

The jet stream, that great manipulator in the sky, was up to no good.

The week before Christmas looked to be wet rather than white.

During the night of Dec. 17-18 I was awakened a couple times by the rattle of the decorative window frame that hangs from the side of our house next to our bedroom.

This is the audible confirmation of the south wind, the snow-eating chinook of Baker Valley.

By morning, as I feared, the lawn was bare on the south and west sides of the house.

The north side, sheltered by the house, was still white. But it was only ersatz slush, the source of soggy socks rather than of snowmen.

Slush is like fruitcake — common around Christmas but the favorite of no one.

The National Weather Service, which sometimes plays the role of Scrooge through no fault of its own, is predicting a series of depressingly similar days leading to Christmas.

High temperatures in the low 40s.

Frequent changes for precipitation — but of the liquid variety.

The outlook isn’t completely abysmal.

Although even the sophisticated computer the National Weather Service deploys struggle to sniff out the atmospheric details more than few days in advance, these digital prognosticators rarely miss general trends.

As of Dec. 18, a week before Christmas, the models, in their coy way, that the pattern could turn colder around the 24th.

I cling to this despite its uncertainty.

Nature, of course, knows nothing of holidays.

But happy coincidences can happen.

On the evening of Dec. 7, for instance, an hour or so before Baker City’s Christmas parade started, snowflakes began to fall for the first time in almost two weeks.

The snow enriched the parade, decorating the costumes of the Grinch and Santa alike.

I’m hoping for a similar storm to commence on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day.

Snow is ephemeral, to be sure.

But then so is Christmas.

When the two coincide the combination, like the season, can be tinged with magic.

Which is better than slash.

Or fruitcake.