Too Damned Warm For Snow, Too Damned Cold For Monkey

It must be thirty years now at least since North Miami started its Winternational Festival, tying it in with the Thanksgiving Day Parade as a way of kicking off the Christmas shopping season and hoping to reinvigorate the 125th Street shopping district. Didn't happen! The malls were too firmly entrenched, the local shops too shoddy or "neighborhood oriented". But the parade and festival survived and prospered.

In more recent years high end antique shops started to replace the second hand shops. The city built a new police station in the heart of downtown as well as the Museum Of Contemporary Art, more commonly called MOCA. That attracted a good number of art galleries. The whole flavor of the shopping district changed. Recently we knew we'd made it when the Starbucks opened!

So here we are, with the Starbucks behind Monkey's head in the photo, and trucked in "snow", finely chipped ice actually, piled up for the kids to play in and then soon melt in the eighty degree Florida "winter" air. Anyway, it sure looked nice and some parents did bring their kids to experience the snow, something most had only seen in movies and on TV.

Nowadays we have a lot of city residents of Carribean decent, Haitian, Jamaican and some Cuban mostly, so there's not the "snow tradition" of Americans from the northeast and midwest, or Europeans from Germany, Scandinavia, and the British Isles. But kids are kids. Snow is irresistable. They had fun.