December in Bangkok feels almost magical. The temperature drops just enough to pull out the long-sleeved shirts and sweaters for my morning walk to the skytrain station, and the sky is a pale, cloudless blue that signals the end of the year. Christmas...
The first time I saw snow I was 26 years old and living 12,000 miles from the only tropical home I had ever known. It had been a strange winter in St. Louis, with two terrible ice storms that took down power lines and left hundreds of homes without electricity...