“Snow fell. Carolers moved among the mansions of Prairie Avenue, pausing now and then to enter the fine houses for hot mulled cider and cocoa. The air was scented with woodsmoke and roasting duck. In Graceland Cemetery, to the north, young couples raced their sleighs over the snow-heaped undulations, pulling their blankets especially tight as they passed the dark and dour tombs of Chicago’s richest and most powerful men, the tombs’ bleakness made all the more profound by their juxtaposition against the night-blued snow […] Outside the snow muffled the concussion of passing horses. Trains bearing fangs of ice tore through the crossing at Wallace.”

“When we pulled out into the winter night and the real snow, our snow, began to stretch out beside us and twinkle against the windows, and the dim lights of small Wisconsin stations moved by, a sharp wild brace came suddenly into the air. That's my middle-west - not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns, but the thrilling returning trains of my youth and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow.”

“In the bleak mid-winterFrosty wind made moan, Earth stood hard as iron,Water like a stone;Snow had fallen, snow on snow,Snow on snow,In the bleak mid-winterLong ago.”

“In the bleak midwinter Frosty wind made moan, Earth stood hard as iron, Water like a stone; Snow had fallen, Snow on snow, Snow on snow, In the bleak midwinter, Long ago. ”

“In a dry wind like this, snow and ice can pass directly into the air as a gas without having first melted to water. This process is called sublimation; tonight the snow in the yard and the ice in the creek sublime.”

“Gusts of snow blew in front of the car as he felt his way toward Man o' War Boulevard .... The snow-covered fields made him think of the desert. Black fences rimmed with snow created a grid against the blank, vanished ground. He saw five snow-blanketed horses huddled under a clump of trees .... He was surprised they weren't lolling on feather beds in their climate-controlled barns. Racehorses got better care than some people, he thought.”