Very few people are fans of the cold. It dries out your skin, wearing a lot of layers means you get too hot when you go inside, and it's hard to text in mittens (unless you get those gloves that work with touch screens, but mittens are cooler). Cold is gross, certainly, BUT when it is accompanied by frozen flakes of ice, somehow it becomes worthwhile. So I think we should all give cold a break when it chooses to bestow upon us magical, wintry sky crystals. Or if you're less imaginative and hate things that sound cool, snow.

You can appear immediately fanciful and fun if you twirl around and catch snowflakes on your tongue.

Everybody knows that only really adorable, happy people do this, if movies are any indication. So if you need a surefire way to convince someone that you are charming, snow is a perfect means to do so. Trying to impress the boy or girl of your dreams? Wanting to make new friends? Looking for a Christmas miracle to fall into your lap? All you have to do is rush out of a building in obvious delight. Then, look to the sky in pure joy, as if the heavens have opened up and you are seeing angels for the first time. Next, throw your arms out in flourish, begin to twirl while maintaining eye contact with angels, and finally, open your mouth and stick out your tongue to receive flakes that surely must taste like sugar plums and dreams. Congratulations, you've done it! Now you are whimsical!

It hides all the ugly stuff under a blanket of pure white.

There's nothing like that moment when you first wake up after it's been snowing all night to find that you have been transported from your gross, boring setting to actual real-life Narnia sort of. Suddenly even the dumpster out back looks as though it holds some enchanted secret, like a friendly satyr or a beautiful ice queen with platinum blonde hair and eyes that are much too large for her head who sings songs that really aren't catchy enough for everyone to be singing them whenever someone tells them to "let it go" for like two whole years so maybe she should just shut up. What snow does to scenery is like what bacon does to everything; makes terrible things bearable and good things impossibly great.

It can turn life into Star Wars.

Sometimes, when I was little, I would stand in front of the windows at night for fifteen minutes at a time when it was snowing, because if you stare at it coming down for long enough, it starts to look like the stars as they whip by when the Millennium Falcon goes into hyper-drive. Nighttime snowfall makes it so much easier to pretend that your zooming across the galaxies, fleeing the Empire or Benedict Cumberbatch as Khan (though why anyone would want to move away from instead of towards him is a mystery to me). What's even better is when you're in the car and you turn on your high beams. Who needs to see the road when you're in space? There are no roads in space. Just asteroid fields and black holes. So watch out for those, maybe.

Snowball fights are a perfect way to channel your aggression with minimal physical damage.

One might say that snow is like God placing endless ammo at your feet for hours of harmless fun. Mostly harmless. Like you probablywon't need to go to the hospital. But still one must not underestimate the sting of tightly-packed ice as it hits your face at high speeds. Or if your like me, considerably slower speeds. Or you just miss entirely. But if your snowball does find its target, watching it explode as it makes contact with your opponent can be immensely satisfying, especially when that person is that bully at school who stole your lunch money or maybe your sister who wore your shirt last week and returned it with a stain. These injustices have a price, and that price is best served cold.

HOT CHOCOLATE.

I think it is a federal offense to not drink hot chocolate when it's snowing. Or at least it should be. I think the lobbyists are working on it. I don't know who first came up with the idea of essentially drinking a desert that warms your insides and your heart, but thank God they did, or else kids coming in from playing in the snow would've had to settle for something gross like heated prune juice, which is probably a thing, I don't know. Never before has a drink been so suited to a weather pattern, except maybe water and rain. But that might not really be the same thing.