Julia Maher ‘23

Mrs. Green Christmas (Heat Miser)

Editor’s note: This article appears in our annual Eggplant Edition, comprised exclusively of satirical articles.

When people from other areas of the US travel to New England, they may be bewildered by many things—the obsession with sports teams, the accent, the blunt attitude—but one phenomenon is completely inexplicable. Many events are cancelled due to rain in New England;  however, when there’s snow on the ground for the majority of the winter, they do not seem to mind it. They carry on with their lives like nothing happened and just don’t care. Once it even remotely drizzles, however, they all become “special snowflakes” and decide to cancel events due to the weather, which is an extension of cancel culture.

I come from the Pacific Northwest (PNW) where we don’t even use umbrellas when it down pours and we just carry on like normal. I remember when I first arrived at Holy Cross for my freshman year, and I heard that an event had been cancelled because of rain. I thought to myself, why would they possibly do that? I am so accustomed to rain that it doesn’t bother me at all. I had never heard of events being cancelled because of rain, with the exception of maybe the odd baseball game. When interviewing a sophomore PNW native about her perspective, Sarah Cooper ’23 said, “I feel like when it’s like down pouring in the PNW nobody thinks twice, but in New England it’s like chaos & full on complaining the minute it starts to barely drizzle.” This definitely rings true—when it starts raining lightly, many Holy Cross students complain and do not even want to go outside.

Although New Englanders could call PNW natives snowflakes for cancelling events due to snow, it is important to remember that snow is much more dangerous than rain, especially for driving. The Northeastern US has much better systems in place to manage snowfall, including a plethora of plows and other equipment to allow people to carry on like normal. Rain, however, does not require any of that special attention because it is inherently innocuous. These cultural phenomenons and differences in behaviors among regions of the US are intriguing and perplexing. By traveling to other places, we can enrich our cultural understanding and tolerance of other groups of people.