My siblings and I grew up in the Deep South. We didn’t see much snow.

I’ve seen photos of myself when I was about two years old, wearing a little plaid coat with the hood up, standing in the snow. I don’t remember the snow, but I do remember the photos, which is sort of like remembering the snow.

When I was 18, it snowed again. I had tonsillitis and was too sick to go out and play, but my sibling made a (small) snowman. It was no more than two feet tall, and it stayed in the family’s chest freezer until our mom got frustrated with shifting it around every time she wanted to extract a package of ground beef.

In any case, snow? Not so much.

However, one of the favorite games of the kids in my family was snow. We would scoop up handfuls of pretend snow and pack pretend snowballs. We’d throw those pretend snowballs at each other. This game took place exclusively indoors, in the family home, a circa 1974 mobile home.

After we grew tired of tossing imaginary snowballs at each other, we’d lie down on the golden-brown shag carpet in the living room and make snow angels. I don’t remember how we even knew about snow angels. One of us must have read about them, or maybe we saw them on TV. (Is there a snow angel scene in the Charlie Brown Christmas special?) We’d lie on our backs and rub our little arms and legs back and forth through the shag carpeting. (It’s a wonder we never got rug burns.) When we stood up and looked back, we could almost see the outlines of angels in the carpet.

After we were both grown-up, my sibling (of tiny snow person fame) moved to the Midwest. The first time I visited her, I got lucky and the town got snow. After some snowball throwing, we got down to business and lay on our backs on the ground to make snow angels.

It was one of my few adult experiences actually as fun as I imagined it would be when I was a kid. But I did learn that shag carpeting is a lot warmer and drier than snow.

Apparently my siblings and I were not the only people who had the idea of making snow angels in shag carpet. In a book called Schooled by Anisha Lakhani, a couple of young women do the same thing.

Image courtesy of https://www.pexels.com/photo/christmas-cold-friends-frosty-269370/.