More snow than Mzansi's angels can use

Lihle Z Mtshali : It was the night before Christmas, when all through the city not a snowflake was in sight, not even a single crystal.

The children of Mzansi, having their first Christmas in New York, stared hopefully at the sky before going to bed, and visions of a white Christmas danced in their dreams.

We were disappointed to wake up to the same old grey streets we had been looking at the night before. It was going to be a non-white Christmas for us, but the weather channel promised we would get snow the next day, so we happily ate our lunch with friends from home knowing that the next day we'd go outside and make snow angels and snowmen.

It started snowing on Sunday morning as we were on our way to church, and by midday, when we came out, the ground was covered in snow and the short walk to the car was brutally cold and slippery. Driving home was a surreal experience, watching the snow falling on cars and people's yards.

By late afternoon, the mild snowfall had graduated into a full-blown blizzard and the next morning all news channels were reporting on nothing but the aftereffects of the snowstorm. Snow ploughs were sent out to clear the streets, people's cars were buried, trains were cancelled, the friends who had spent Christmas day with us couldn't get to Miami - the next leg of their trip - because flights were cancelled, and another friend was updating her Facebook status about her flight home to South Africa being cancelled.

The 50.8cm snowfall was the sixth biggest in New York City's history, with the worst being 68.3cm, measured in February 2006. Central Park is used as the barometer to measure the city's snowfall, but some parts of New York and surrounding states were hit by over 60cm of snow.

From inside our home it seemed like all of this was happening in another world because the beauty of America is that, while temperatures are below zero outside, you can walk around your house in a summer dress because of central heating.

On Tuesday, the second day after the blizzard, New York mayor Mike Bloomberg held a press conference where he was hammered by media about streets not being cleared quickly enough. He made the usual noises about the city and its department of sanitation doing everything they could to fix the situation, but nobody was impressed.

New York City's sanitation commissioner, John J Doherty, admitted that the department would not meet its usual goal of ploughing all city streets within 36 hours after snow stops falling.

On Wednesday evening, Bloomberg was still making promises that all streets would be ploughed by Thursday morning, 96 hours after the snow stopped falling.

Nobody believed him, especially amid stories that the street that he lives on and those of sanitation department bigwigs had been ploughed first, surprise surprise, and conspiracy theories about sanitation workers being on a go-slow as revenge for budget cuts in their department and the demotion of 100 supervisors.

Bloomberg nobly took the blame for the slow response to the storm. But hey, it's easy to accept responsibility when there are no immediate consequences, right? It's not like he's going to be summarily fired because the city failed to respond quickly. Anyway, who else should take the blame but you, Mr Mayor?

The city council has scheduled a hearing on the response effort to the blizzard for the 10th of this month. When they eventually come out with the findings of that hearing, it will be summer and people will be coming out of their 4th of July barbecues wearing short shorts in a state of inebriation.

And speaking of drunken messes, a second freak of nature was due to drop from the sky on New Year's Eve in the form of reality star Nicole "Snooki" Polizzi of Jersey Shore. Snooki promised to climb into a ball to be lowered onto New York's Times Square at the stroke of midnight.

Thankfully, that madness was moved to Seaside Heights, New Jersey, where her show is shot. That way, fewer people would be subjected to the poofed reality star.

Not to be confused with the traditional Times Square New Year's Eve ball which is dropped every year to ring in the New Year, Snooki's ball would be at MTV's New Year's Bash, where her 15 minutes of fame would pass 14 minutes and 59 seconds and counting.

Happy New Year.