Snow Ice Cream
Elvis always croons on my birthday because we share the day, although he isn’t using January 8th much anymore except for the radio and TV tributes. I bet Elvis knew the ambivalence people feel about giving birthday gifts exactly two weeks after Christmas. I have always suspected you get more stuff if your birthday is in July.
Too often growing up I got combo gifts – Christmas and birthday – which was parent speak for nothing big will show up on the actual day. Enjoy the cake.
Elvis and I also share the day with Richard Nixon and “Ole Tricky” isn’t celebrating anymore either. On my first birthday after we married, which would have been the big 4-0, Jan got me a card that had a picture of Elvis and Nixon shaking hands with a caption: “What do both these two men have in common?” Not much I guessed, but as I opened the card was delighted to read: They both share Michael Hallmark’s birthday!”
Now before the gentle reader revolts because I’m name-dropping rather than being true to my title, let’s set the scenario that inspired this blurb. I had an idea pitched from StoryWorth to write about my earliest memory. I decided to sub the actual first memory in favor of my earliest birthday memory.
We were living in Iowa, La, just outside Lake Charles, and I turned six years old. I was excited to be six because that meant I would be old enough for school in the fall. The kindergarten posse hadn’t snared me in their net, so I would be going cold turkey into the first grade. I was ready to get out of the house!
A tradition that was broken this year is my birthday is usually the first really cold day of the year. We have seldom had White Christmases in my southern addresses but have often had snow on my birthday two weeks later.
Including on January 8th, 1959, in Lake Charles, La.
I remember getting up to a cold house and immediately heading for the big gas stove that warmed the back porch room and roasting my backside. I still dream of an appliance with that functionality. The ventless fireplace we have now is pretty but just doesn’t do as thorough a job.
My mother pointed out the window at the snow, something I had seen a time or two when we lived in North Texas. But to have snow this close to the Gulf of Mexico and on my birthday was a double bonus event!
My mother always made a big chocolate cake for my birthday. I know this because of a picture we have in our bonus room taken on my first birthday. The picture was taken in Crowell, Tx on Jan 8th, 1954. It looks like I have pulled myself up and am using my highchair for balance. The highchair is topped by a chocolate cake with a big old single candle. In the background is a dog I remember as Duchess and the scraggly lunar landscape of Baja Oklahoma.
I am sure I got a chocolate cake in 1959 also. But the big cake was saved for the real party with friends that would happen that evening. For the morning, she made a cupcake with chocolate icing. Still, it was not the cupcake or the looming schooling that seared that day into my memory. It was my mother’s suggestion we make Snow Ice Cream.
Those were the dark days before the founding of Blue Bell, the little creamery in Brenham, Tx, but I was familiar with regular ice cream. Still, I was not a worldly six, so I had never heard of Snow Ice Cream.
My mother bundled me up much like the kid in Christmas Story as that is how all kids in the 50s dressed for cold weather. We went out into the yard and scooped up a generous portion of snow into a bowl and then raced back to the back porch room and the nurturing gas stove.
I had to look up how to make Snow Ice Cream online and will post the recipe at the end of this article. My memory is one where mother simply poured magic stuff in the bowl, waved a wand that looked like a big spoon and voila! Snow Ice Cream!
She sang “Happy Birthday”, and I blew out the single candle she put on the cupcake. She then cut the cupcake and topped it with Snow Ice Cream. I remember the mixture as the best taste I had ever had! The fact I haven’t changed my mind in 65 years is a testament to the viability of Snow Ice Cream.
My wife looks down on my fond memory of Snow Ice Cream. She was raised in Pennsylvania, and they have too much snow to really appreciate the white avalanche as a gift. She points out the ground may have been crossed by skunks or other varmints and eating snow off the ground was unthinkable and unsanitary.
All I can counter with is pity for having to grow up in the North. Their blasé attitude about snow and general fastidiousness probably also robs them of the joys of lying on your belly on a riverbank to drink from a running rapid. When you are suffering from 105 degrees of Texas summertime heat, who cares if fish poop in the water?
Wisdom says when life gives you lemons, make lemonade. When you grow up in the South, life so rarely gives you snow, so when it does, Carpe Diem ... make Snow Ice Cream!
