Hey, Old Man Winter?  Ummm … we need to talk.

Look – I understand that being all cold and bone chilling and overall just depressing is kind of your thing, but here’s the thing – some of us live in Florida. We didn’t sign up for this shit.  If we wanted to spend our days with chapped lips and frozen toes, there are certainly places a bit farther north that we could be living … like the North Pole. Instead we chose this – the land of sunsets and beaches and even the occasional bikini, or so I’m told – but this atrocious weather as of late hasn’t exactly been very inviting for fruity, rum-based drinks laden with little plastic umbrellas, if you know what I’m saying…

You see, “winter” for us here in Florida is about having to occasionally wear long-sleeve shirts and closed-toed shoes, not thermal underwear and gigantic, poofy coats that make us look even more like the Michelin Man than we’re really comfortable with! Hell, the other day my wife had to wait for the ice to melt off of her windshield before she could drive home! Ice … windshield … not Margarita glass … is any of this getting through to you?!

I mean, I’m sorry if I sound a little bit on edge, but frankly, this is the second year in a row now that you’ve tried to pull this crap right after the holidays and while we appreciate the sentiment – maybe you’re going for some sort of post-White Christmas Effect or something – it’s important for us to tell you in a constructive criticism-sort of manner that seriously, this is just not working for us.  An overnight of chills here, a blustery weekend there – fine, we can pull out our satirical Floridian Winter Clothes and push through it, but at this point we’re going on, like, three solid weeks of sub-60 temperatures and something’s just gotta give!

This morning I noticed the blankets that my neighbor had strewn through his yard to keep their bushes from freezing and I almost considered stealing them for myself! Forget the plants – people come before plants…

I don’t know if maybe you get some sort of kickback from mitten and hot chocolate sales, but whatever they’re paying you, double it! If I need to take up a collection and have every Floridian throw in a buck, something tells me that we’d all be more than happy at this point to cut back on our morning donuts or even coffee for a single day if only to whisk us back to the bright and cheery, Floridian warmth to which we’ve grown accustomed.  Really, it’s either that or we learn to adapt to this Winter Wonderland climate, with all of the wool hats and long underwear that our northern brethren have become dependent on whenever temperatures slip into the icy cold abyss.

Of course, the chances of that happening are about as likely as Frosty the Snowman building his summer home down here.

Yeah, too soon for that one…

The bottom line is this – here in Florida we’ve come to enjoy a very specific kind of weather, and although it might threaten us with the occasional hurricane or flash flood, those are pretty much the two types of severe weather that we signed up for.  Yep, look it up – there’s a limit, so just like California has earthquakes and mudslides and Kansas has tornados and being absolutely bored out of your mind, here in Florida we’ve already chosen our two as well and cold weather is most definitely not on that list!  I mean, it’s a reasonable misunderstanding, despite all of the rosy cheeks and frozen nose hairs, but now’s the time to correct this chilly mishap.

Seriously, like right now – we’re freezing down here!