by Noëlle Midnight

As a child, I grew up in central Iowa, where I had a mostly positive relationship with snow. My siblings and I would get excited for every snowfall, donning our snow pants, gloves, and hats so that we could get outside and start raising hell.

Of course, there were downsides. We kept outdoor animals, which meant that water bowls would turn to ice; we had to keep a constant focus on making sure that everyone would survive harsh weather, a task that largely fell on us kids. Nevertheless, I loved snow and looked forward to its arrival every winter, marking the start of the Christmas season.

Growing up with Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, and Michael Bublé (to say nothing of the Glee cast) all singing the holiday classics, “Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!” always felt like a joyful plea to the heavens. The world in unison screaming at the skies for the true marker of winter to finally beset itself upon our small corner of the world.

I rarely thought about how “the weather outside is frightful” except when it came to driving. However, as I grew up and transitioned into the throes of a young marriage, I always held onto the second half of the song, as the traditional pop vocalists all crooned the phrase “as long as you love me so, let it snow.”

Later in life, in my late 20s, I finally left Iowa, just to land myself farther into snow country: northern Wisconsin. With that move, I began to feel my age a little bit more than I’d held it before, youth sprinkled with the promise of growing old. Every snowfall felt like an exclamation point on the Christmas season, sure, but increasingly, snow felt like a burden as my arms and back ached, throwing it clear of the driveway and sidewalks as my lungs burned, inhaling the sub-zero winter air I’d come to detest.

The first year I lived in Wisconsin, we got so much snow that by the time winter was over, it was towering over our heads on both sides of the driveway that we could hardly keep clear enough to park our cars. Seven-foot drifts on either side, as we kept shoveling snow, defying nature’s call for us to simply stay home. How I wish we’d had “no place to go.”

By this point in my life, I began to experience more of the darkness of snow. The immobility that it causes. The way that it can get under your shingles and damage your roof. It forces you to risk your life every time you go to work, need groceries, or have a simple desire to get out of the house and see your friends.

That year, we played a lot of video games instead of seeing friends. The snow was too much to tackle and it wasn’t worth risking my life again, after prior close calls where I would lose vision or traction while driving on ice covered highways, accompanied only by snow plows and Ford F250s that think their all-wheel drive means they can still approach the speed limit (until you see them in the ditch a mile farther along).

I was in my late 20s at this point, and the weather outside was, frankly, frightful.

In light of that newfound respect and fear of the snow, when I heard this classic played over PAs in stores, I started to rankle. I’d start praying silently every time we had to go somewhere during the winter, hoping the roads would be clear and we wouldn’t have to spend too much energy or back pain scooping the driveway.

One of these winters, I started to discover the Christmas music of Sufjan Stevens. I eventually found myself with a copy of Silver & Gold, the specific collection on which this song is found, and after 46 tracks of eclectic Christmas music, most of which was unlike anything I’d ever heard, I got to the song that would stick with me the most: Sufjan’s rendition of “Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!”

This version works better for me than the more traditional interpretations that float about for a few reasons. Sufjan took the song and shifted it into a minor key, immediately making it sadder and more ominous. No longer was this a song excited about the snow falling, but rather it became a song about surviving the winter.

From the first notes of the acoustic guitar paired with ethereal vocalizations, you get the sense that this song is set in the middle of not just a snowfall, but a blizzard. This is a song that represents the most dangerous, scariest, and most cruel weather that large swaths of the U.S. are subject to. This is no longer the song written by two men in California who are hoping for snow to spark their Christmas season, but rather a warning sign from someone who’s experienced desolation and knows that the uncaring hand of winter is knocking at their door.

Vocals come in. There are two distinct vocal lines: Sufjan on the melody and Cat Martino floating above with a dark harmony. With delicate vibrato, each line of the melody is reflected with somber yet effervescent harmonies, as if to make explicit the idea that snow is both beautiful and terrible.

After two verses, we get a quiet drum in the background. Big and boomy, this drum clods along on the first of six counts while sleigh bells hit the fourth, evoking an enormous impending doom while leaving a ton of space in the mix, allowing the song to feel desolate and trodding. The slow march of a storm.

This point in the song sounds to me like the feeling of driving during a whiteout. All you can see are snowflakes whizzing past your windshield as if they were stars turning into streaks as you enter hyperspeed. It’s the feeling of knowing that you can’t see where the lane markers are on the road anymore, driving on feel and faith, hoping that you’re still in the lane where you belong.

Now I’m in my 30s, living in Seattle, and I don’t really get that much snow anymore. Sure, it comes down lightly once every so often during the darkest months of winter, but it never stays more than a day or two. Plus, now that I’m primarily reliant on public transit, I don’t feel trapped by it as much as I did when I was in Iowa or Wisconsin.

Yet, I still hear the message as Sufjan manages to say that even while you’re frozen, unable to function due to the horrors of the outside world, that everything can be alright, at least for a moment, if you hold your loved ones close. If that’s the trick to surviving, I have faith that we can get through this and any other storm that comes our way together. So, let it snow.

Let it snow.

Let it snow!

Noëlle Midnight (e/er) is a transgender podcaster, poet, musician, and photographer in Seattle, WA. E can be found online with er podcasts Idle Curiosities and Midnights with the Lizard Wizard, tweets on Bluesky at @noellemidnight.com, photos on the Instagram alternative Glass at @noellemidnight, and movie reviews of varying quality on Letterboxd at @noellemidnight.