Washington Braces for “Snowmaggedon”

By Amanda Pendolino on February 5th, 2010

washington-snow-sm The Washington, D.C.-area is expected to receive up to two feet of snow today, in a storm being dubbed Snowmageddon. (No word on whether Bruce Willis will show up to save the day.) According to The Washington Post, the White House has canceled the daily press briefing with White House press secretary Robert Gibbs.

Deputy press secretary Bill Burton also Tweeted about what to call the coming storm — a subject of some debate online,where creative types have taken to giving District snowstorms clever names. Burton came down on the side of using the same hashtag as for the last big snowstorm, “snowpocalypse.”

Clever names, babies. I grew up in Buffalo, New York, where two feet of snow is a nice spring day. That wouldn’t even be enough to get a snow day, unless it all happened between 5 and 7 am, giving the plows too much to do before the buses had to pick up all the kids. Three or four feet – now that’s a snow day possibility. I remember listening to the radio, hopefully clutching my plush Snoopy and waiting to see if my school, Clarence, would be named. Some days you’d tune in just as the DJ was reading the Ds and Es – and you’d have to suffer through the entire alphabet before hearing the verdict.

On Christmas Eve in 2001, we received over seven feet of snow. It wasn’t a blizzard. It wasn’t ”Snowmaggedon.” It was just Christmas.