Somehow this flaker has connived its way into the hearts and mittens of America.  Every snowflake is unique!  You can slide on it!  Let's make an angel the way it would look if you shot Gabriel in the head and he fell on his back!  When it snows, all bets are off and the opportunities are endless - missing work, skidding off the road and into debt, taking out your aggression against your roommates guised as playfulness.

But snow doesn't just reflect the morning light and street lamps - it reflects our gullibility, vanity and personal demons.

Sure, snow is cute while it's first falling and accumulating into pillowy piles of fairy dust.  It's a fun adventure driving into town as you jump out every 5 minutes to clear the wipers and shoot videos of you and your friends cavorting around.  But like a baby ocelot in a downtown loft, snow outgrows its cuteness and rips your life apart.  Walking becomes a tedious game of avoid-the-ice-patch.  Street parking disappears as plows clear the main road, creating snow banks on the sides.  The landscape turns into a landfill, a dirty, sterile mass of bleakness like your own icy "Children of Men."

But all that can be overcome by cute outfits!  You've suckered us in, Old Navy and Urban Outfitters, with your fluffy parkas and fleece caps.  The more brutal it is outside, the more you can accessorize not just yourself but your hapless dog, who has yet to evolve opposable thumbs or a language that can convey "get this arfing sweater off me."

Even the most adorable boots can't stomp out the racism that underlies our worship of snow.  Eskimos don't have any fanciful illusions about their white oppressor.  Africans would rather re-apartheid than deal with snow.  Hip urbanites may as well be hailing the Third Reich when they chatter excitedly about an oncoming blizzard that will drain all color from the environment.

Like calling someone a whore right as the room goes quiet, snow is unavoidable.  We can put up with it, we can make it more bearable with hearty ingestibles.  But we idolize its flurrious wrath at our own peril.