To think kids media should ease up on the representations of snow

[someladdersandsnakes]

Trying to be lighthearted here but this is bugging me
CBeebies has wall-to-wall snow right now, in all the Christmas episodes and in-between segments, anything to do with Christmas or winter = SNOW SNOW SNOW
Except for Bluey which represents Australian December accurately.
Also books from the library, British ones, it's snowing at Christmas and anything about the seasons is like "in winter it snows bla bla bla"
Well my DD has never seen snow in all of her 5 years and she asks every day when it's going to start snowing, and getting disappointed that it isn't snowing yet.
AIBU to want to see Christmas or winter represented without snow occasionally so it's accurate to our actual lives?

If you live near the coast in Brighton you can easily walk to Queens Park. I live in Brighton. Even if you lived on the coast in Hove Actually you could still walk to Queens Park. What 5 parks are you near?
Has she met a squirrel at St Ann's well yet?

You have a very strange definition of “nowhere near”. Brighton is hardly some vast metropolis, it’s tiny, only about 3 miles across. You can walk from one end to the other in 40 minutes. Stanmer is not “far inland”, it’s 4 miles from the coast.

I agree with you OP. Christmas cards should feature mud, relentlessly grey weather and the hopeless misery of the English winter. It is pointless trying to bring any joy into our children's lives

I did intend this as a light hearted post but I'm getting a lot of shaming now for not giving my daughter specific life experiences that I either couldn't access or still can't access.

The point isn't you are being unreasonable not to drive your dd to where there are ducks and snow. The point is that you're being utterly ridiculous to expect kids' tv to tweak or remove things that are perfectly fine, just because they don't happen to be part of your dd's everyday life!

That would be a totally fair point if that was the only thing people were disagreeing with me about, but I've also had a lot of replies berating me for not taking my daughter to see ducks/snow!

@Sparkledr Queen's Park is an hour and a half walk from my house. @Rouleur Stanmer Park is two and a half hours walk. Is that your idea of walking distance for a day out with a toddler? I honestly can't tell whether I'm being trolled with comments like this.

Agree. Partly because I hate it when it does snow, as I have disabilities that are manageable most of the time, but confine me to the house worse than lockdown when we get slippery icy snow. I don't WANT a white Christmas! And am very glad that we don't usually have one in southern England. If people like snow, fine; but I hate it being represented as a special part of Christmas.

But snow gives some people far less joy and more misery than 'relentlessly grey weather'. I don't mind the greyness that much; it's seasonal; I prefer summer, but greyness doesn't make me miserable. But icy paths and pavements do!

I don't think children should be deprived of fairy tales about The Snow Queen, or Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer pulling Santa's sleigh. But I think that programmes that are supposed to be about real life should not always imply that snow is a key part of Christmas everywhere.

So much of kids worlds is make-believe as in the books and TV they read, there is talking animals, fairies, dinosaurs and humans living together, trains that talk etc.

And kids brains can cope with all this yet seeing snow on cards/books/tv etc. Yet not seeing snow when they go to nursery or school as much

Al this and the same kids don't understand snow is not always around?

I give kids more credit than that

I live in Australia, there is zero snow. OK, we maybe get a few flakes once a year at the top of Bluff Knoll, but I don't think it has ever snowed in Perth. And yet our Xmas decorations are covered in snow! It makes no sense!

YABU and deeply precious. What an utterly weird thing to be annoyed about.

I know what you're saying. It would be nice if a couple of Christmas shows could not involved snow. It often doesn't snow on Christmas day.

I'd think that if children can handle the idea of talking pigs and dogs, they can handle the idea that snow might not always be there in the real world like it is on TV.

I'm not trolling you but unless you are lying about living on the seafront in Brighton then Queens Park is not an hour and half's walk!
Do you live further out in Portslade?
Even if you walked from Hove Park to Queens park that would take 1 hour. I cannot understand where in Brighton especially, near the seafront, that you live that takes so long to walk to Queens Park to see ducks!
Get a bus or train to stanmer...that only takes 5 mins!

My child was 3 at the start of lockdown and it was really hard, our world also became very small and I did my best to entertain him. In all seriousness op I don't think it's terrible that your child didn't see ducks for a few years! And probably best to be honest that if you live near the sea, it makes it hard for snow to settle on the ground. This is something I was told as a child and I never really understood the science but just accepted it as true.

I think I'd prefer if you WERE trolling me because it's deeply weird what you are doing. Why can't you accept that people are telling the truth about their own lives? I live on portslade seafront yes you guessed it yourself, are you satisfied with that location as being too far to walk to either Stanmer Park or Queen's Park for a casual day out with a toddler?
Public transport is irrelevant to this conversation because I'm talking about a time when public transport was risky and I didn't want to do long journeys on it, however getting a bus or train to Stanmer Park does not "take 5 minutes" it's two buses or one bus and a train or two trains and takes an hour and a half so I wouldn't bother to do that even now.
Also, what is with all this "why don't you just go to..." stuff anyway? I don't give a shit about ducks! It was great when eventually we were travelling far enough from home that we saw them incidentally but believe it or not, I did not spend the pandemic worried that we weren't seeing any ducks and researching where we could travel a long way to see them. We did other things! I never, at any point on this thread, even once asked where I can see ducks in Brighton. And I definitely, definitely, definitely did not ask for PLACES I COULD HAVE SEEN DUCKS TWO YEARS AGO.

Thanks to everyone who has given opinions on the actual topic. I did read all the comments and they're generally fair enough.

Thank you xx

This thread is hilarious. OP I can just imagine you banging your head against a wall and bitterly regretting ever mentioning the bloody ducks.

Commiserations, I've had threads like that where people just pick up on some throwaway incidental comment and worry at it like a dog with a bone.

It snowed in London up until the 1970’s, then the snow just reduced through the 1970’s and 1980’s. In Surbiton in 1984 it snowed on Christmas Day, but since then, not much snow at Christmas time at all. In the past few years we have had snow in March or April, but not December! Maybe we will be lucky this year - it has been significantly cooler in the past month…

@someladdersandsnakes ok, so you don't live in Brighton at all, you live in Portslade. Fair enough, Queens Park, Stanmer etc are quite a long way away from you. But if you claim that you live on the seafront in Brighton, people will take you at your word, hence the confusion.

We have spent a couple of Christmases in New Zealand.

I remember seeing a lovely Santa in the snow decoration in a bakery window when it was boiling hot outside. I asked the man serving if he thought it was weird having snowy decorations the summer and he said it was just traditional (and he liked them).

Portslade is in Brighton and Hove, if I lived in proper Hove I would also have said Brighton so that people would know where I was talking about as not everyone in the country would have heard of Hove and everyone will have heard of Brighton. And I originally had concerns over giving away my exact location so I wasn't precise. I think most people would accept "I don't live within walking distance of ducks" and believe it without hounding incessantly for a precise location because you're convinced I can't possibly be telling the truth.

"I haven't told you my precise location, but I don't live within walking distance of ducks"
"You live within walking distance of Queen's Park"
"You live within walking distance of Stanmer Park"
"You live within walking distance of Newhaven "
Mumsnet is a weird fucking place sometimes.

Literally no-one ever who lives in Hove has said they live in Brighton, and they are extremely quick to correct you that they live in "Hove, actually" if you suggest they do.

Actually you're right. I don't know about the OP, but what bothers me is not the children's stories and TV with snow in them, but the cultural (adult) romanticising of Snow at Christmas. I know I'm being a bit U, as people can't make it snow by saying they want it. But this sentimentalizing of snow seems to be a fairly modern phenomenon. There is plenty of snow in old carols like 'Good King Wenceslas', but it isn't treated as joyful!

I used to live in the arse-end of Hangleton and still told out-of-towners ‘I live in Brighton’.