The sky is falling! It’s just snow — or talk of it — but it sends shivers up our spines

Editor’s note: A version of this story was published in The Telegraph in February 2008.

On a frigid morning 121 years ago, long before television or radio weather forecasts could hint — make that shriek, bleat or red-alert flash — that snow might be in the offing, parts of Georgia wore a powder blanket.

The Peach State was socked-in, no doubt paralyzed. Or was it? Residents were in a tizz. Or were they?

A witty account from shivering Atlanta made it into the pages of the New York Times. The dispatch’s tone was one of Southerners-meet-snow and the curiosity therein. So said The Times of Dec. 7, 1886:

It was not until late last night that alarm seized upon the citizens of Atlanta. ... The leading sensation was the hasty adjournment of the Legislature. The State Capitol is a six-story building with rather unsafe walls. The Legislature had no sooner approved the minutes of Saturday’s session than word was brought in that (an) engineer ... declared that the roof was about to fall. ... The members grasped their hats and ran out of doors, reaching the sidewalk with a celerity not consistent with legislative dignity.

One can envision a similarly themed write-up even now. Not necessarily about the gold dome’s roof caving or fleet-footed politicos, but an obligatory piece on out-of-their-element locals.

There is something telling, though, in the picture the Times paints. On that century-ago morning, there was snow on the ground all the way to the Florida line, and, arriving either by rail, horse or on foot, Georgia lawmakers had convened. Can you imagine the Capitol, or any government facility for that matter, opening on a snowy morn these days?

Which raises a question. Is this region’s snow fear a modern phenomenon — and a perceived one at that?

Richard Pillsbury, a retired Georgia State University geography professor, says it may well be.

Though he knows of no scholarly work on the subject, Pillsbury says there could be some validity in the argument that the media are, at least in part, to blame. The idea being that because, to use Weather Channel parlance, “snow events” are anything but common in these parts, mere mention of flurries in a forecast can result in an over-sounding of alarms.

When the national media chime in — “Snow Socks South” — the perception from America’s geographic and snow-savvy top half tends to be, “Oh, look at the little people getting a mini-dose of what we get all the time.”

But ask yourself, do you go cuckoo when it snows? Do you panic, duct tape yourself into a closet?

Snow time in the South is honestly about as peaceful as it gets around here anymore. There is a pristine quiet to it, a delicate rarity that we’d just as soon not soil with tire marks, footprints and road scrapers. While there is certainly a snow-as-UFO fascination to a Southern snowscape, other than iced bridges and closed roads — because, hey, we’re not used to the de-icing drill — the Southern psyche is anything but chilled.

Pillsbury, who co-edited the original “Encyclopedia of Southern Culture” and another volume devoted to the region’s geography, says that in times past when even the foulest weather blew through the region — hurricanes, for instance — that people “just sort of accepted it.”

That may still hold true, aside from the buzz wrought by occasional overreactions to up-to-the-second weather reports. On a Saturday morning in mid-January, area media outlets relayed a winter-weather bulletin from the National Weather Service: “Heavy Snow Advisory.”

The reaction in probably more than a few local households? “Rrrrright.”

Of course, the advisory was canceled an hour or so later, but before it was, there appeared to be no mad dashes in progress at one centrally located Macon Kroger store.

As Bob Swanson, assistant weather editor for USA Today, points out by e-mail, folks in the South sometimes fall victim to the slipperiest of cold-season concoctions: ice storms. Which may further the “they don’t know what to do when it snows” perception from people who live elsewhere, when, in fact, ice is a crippler up north, too.

“One thing that can put Southerners in a tailspin (pun intended) during wintry weather is that it doesn’t typically come as simply snow,” Swanson writes. “More often than not, especially along and east of the Appalachians, cold-air damming can lead to a messy mix of snow, sleet and freezing rain.”

As for that cliche about the home folks flying out to snap up all the milk and bread in advance of an approaching threat? In actuality, tales of such runs on staples are anecdotal at best.

Not that the notion hasn’t kept a North Carolina TV station from producing a semi-spoof of a promotional ad featuring its “weather team” raiding a home-improvement store for snow shovels and fire logs. The spot ends with the station’s lead weather guy in the cab of a milk tanker truck stopped next to a bread van, hollering, “Hey, y’all, I’ve got the milk and the bread!”

On its Web site, the station, WFMY-TV, notes that “due to popular demand ... we have brought back the milk-and-bread ringtone to download to your cell phone.” The ringtone consists of that same weather guy saying the same “hey, y’all” line.

Sam Hilliard, a past professor of geography and anthropology at Louisiana State University, thinks some of the region’s snow anxiety, on the local news front anyway, is an offshoot of sensational forecasting.

“They forecast snow almost as if they’re children waiting for Santa Claus,” Hilliard says. “They almost feel like they’re responsible for it. They want us to have snow, but they can’t quite make it.”

If there is any validity to last-gasp grocery-store gallops, it probably isn’t just a Southern phenomenon. A study from a couple of years back cited in Psychology Today reported that “uncomfortably cold weather seems to stimulate aggressiveness.”

In the study, the magazine reported, researchers “sorted through decades of data from eight major stock exchanges around the world. Whether they looked at Taiwan or Sweden, Australia or the United States, they found that the lower the temperature, the higher the stock returns.”

Hilliard, the retired professor and author of “Hog Meat and Hoecake,” is known for his scholarly works on the South.

“I’m amused by people who constantly tell me what Southern culture is like,” says Hilliard, who in retirement has settled in his native Hart County. “But they’re always from somewhere else.”

Sure, we’ve been known to poke fun at ourselves when the white stuff falls. But pay attention next time it snows, whenever that is. Listen to exactly who it is guffawing and telling us what cold-weather wimps we are.

“All the Yankees tell us that we don’t know how to drive in the snow. Who really wants to know how to drive in the snow?” Hilliard says. “My son responded pretty well. Someone told him that none of the Southerners over in Atlanta know how to drive in the snow. My son responded, ‘I didn’t know there were any Southerners left in Atlanta.’”

This story was originally published January 6, 2017 at 2:00 PM with the headline "The sky is falling! It’s just snow — or talk of it — but it sends shivers up our spines."