Desert dwellers (mostly) cheery in brief winter wonderland

By Brendan Buhler

Friday, Dec. 19, 2008 | 2 a.m.

On Wednesday afternoon the mall’s Santa danced a jig in it, the hardware store sold plastic putty knives to scrape it off windshields and in the Christmas tree lot, the noble firs were, for once, naturally flocked.

Of course, not everyone liked it.

“It’s really snowing. Real snow! In Vegas! It’s disgusting!” shouted Shelly, who used to live in Ohio and wouldn’t give her last name. She was standing outside the Galleria at Sunset mall in Henderson, shivering in her sequined black Bebe sweatsuit and pointing a lipstick-smeared Virginia Slim at the sky. “Stop that! You (unprintable)!”

She said Nevadans have no idea how to deal with snow, are fundamentally unequipped for it and would fall to pieces. “Us Ohioans are going to have to help them out,” she said.

Then she went back inside the mall, where the fake trees had fake snow on them.

Nevadans, meanwhile, were tossing snowballs and grinning like orangutans, even when they slipped on slush the consistency of cold bacon grease. Mall security guards did what they could with the mess, battling it with brooms, window squeegees and water-softener salt. It did no good.

The weather even made conversations about the economy semi-cheerful. Take this example from store employees on a break:

“Oh yeah, you hear what’s happening to us?” one woman said.

“That’s just a rumor,” the guy next to her said.

“Three stores! All closing,” she said. Then she laughed. “Wow, look at this snow, would you?”

Nearby, though, birds were having a harder time of it, huddling under the oleander and chirping sentiments also not fit for a family newspaper.

Across the street at Stu Miller’s The Price is Right Christmas Trees (set up in Sunset Station’s parking lot), the trees looked incredible, cloaked in fluffy snow like props for some TV movie about the real meaning of Christmas. They looked nothing like the foam-flocked trees sitting under an awning, protected from the weather.

How was business?

“Actually, it was good until it started to snow,” said Mike White, a retired RV’er running the lot this year. (“Stu Miller” is actually a Los Angeles-based company called Seasonal Adventures.)

As White dried his gloves near a propane heater, he said business this year is actually better than last year, although it could be because of the lower prices.

On the streets, people drove slowly and anti-lock brakes chattered at every stop sign. Walking home from school, some boys got into snowball fights, and smarter boys offered girls coats. Under 6 inches of snow, palm trees sagged like melted plastic pompoms.

At Dailey’s Ace Hardware on Sunset Road, the family running the store answered calls from people asking if their pipes would freeze (no) and if the store sold replacement wicks for kerosene furnaces (also no).

The top sellers were water softener salt, improvised ice scrapers and firewood, which was selling for the same $5.99 it had been all month. Why didn’t they raise the price during the freak storm?

“We’re not going to do that to people,” store President Greg Dailey said. “Besides, you think I want to be in the paper, ‘Local Hardware Store Gouges Storm Victims’?

“Ha.”