Phoenix to NoVA to Manchester: Packing for Mid-Winter Break

I grew up in Phoenix, which means I grew up without a winter. There was a brief stretch in January where my mum would put on a cardigan in the morning and take it off by 10am, and that was the season. We had Christmas in shorts. We had New Year's Eve in shorts. The Christmas tree was in shorts. I did not own a proper coat until I went away to college, and I bought it secondhand from a girl in my dorm who pitied me.

Now I live in Northern Virginia and have three children who think a snow day every other February is normal. And we spend a chunk of every winter in Manchester, where Tom's mum lives, and Manchester has its own thing going on which I will be careful to call drizzle and not weather. So when President's Day week rolls around — what local mums in Fairfax sometimes call "ski week" because some families head to West Virginia or Snowshoe — we go to England. Three climates. One mid-winter break. Here is how I think about packing for it.

Three winters, one daughter

I have a photograph from December 2022 that I keep on the fridge. Olivia, then six, on my parents' patio in Phoenix in shorts and a sleeveless top, eating a popsicle on Christmas Eve. The temperature was 71. She is squinting because the sun is direct and she is very pink because we forgot sunscreen, which you do, on Christmas, even in Phoenix, because you have lost the muscle memory.

The next photograph is from February 2023. Same kid, in Didsbury, in a borrowed parka three sizes too big from one of Tom's nephews, hood up, drizzle on her face, holding a packet of Skips outside the corner shop. She is also squinting, but for a different reason. Same child. Same year. Two climates that share nothing.

President's Day week and the local "ski week" thing

If you are new to Northern Virginia, you should know that the public schools here build in a generous mid-winter break. Fairfax County does it slightly differently than Arlington, but the upshot is the kids are off for the better part of President's Day week. A lot of NoVA families ski. Snowshoe, Wintergreen, sometimes Whitetail if they are doing a long weekend rather than the full week. Some go further — Park City, Steamboat. We are not really a ski family. We tried it once when Jack was seven and Tom and I both decided we would rather pay for a transatlantic flight than another lift ticket.

So we go to Manchester. Tom's mum loves having us in February — fewer people coming through, the house is quiet, she has the heating on more than she would for herself, and she gets a full week with her grandchildren. The flights are cheaper. The crowds at Heathrow are gentler. The British half-term lines up most years, which means the kids' cousins on Tom's sister's side are also off school and we have built-in playdates without scheduling.

Packing three kids for British drizzle in February

Manchester in February is not cold the way Northern Virginia is cold. NoVA can do a real freeze — Olivia's school once closed for windchill of -8 — but it is dry cold, and a good puffer and a hat handle it. Manchester is 38 degrees and damp, the kind of damp that finds its way through everything you own. You do not pack puffers for Manchester. You pack waterproofs.

One waterproof shell each. Not a parka. A proper rain jacket with a hood that actually stays up.
One fleece or jumper to layer underneath. Henry has a navy one he wears constantly; Olivia has a fleece-lined hoodie that has seen four trips.
Wellies. If the kids do not own them, Tom's mum has a cupboard full of borrowed pairs from the cousins. The cupboard is its own minor miracle.
Wool socks. Two pair per kid per day if you are sensible, which I never am, which is why I do laundry every other night at his mum's.
One "nice" outfit per kid. Tom's mum likes to take us to a proper Sunday lunch at her local. Olivia dresses for it like she is going to the Brits.

What stays at home

This is just as important. We do not bring snow boots to Manchester. We do not bring our Fairfax County puffers, which are warm but bulky and useless in drizzle. We do not bring umbrellas — the wind off the Pennines turns them inside out and Tom's mum has six perfectly good ones in the porch. We do not bring jeans for Henry, because jeans wet through and stay wet, and a damp eight-year-old is a miserable eight-year-old.

What the kids notice

The thing I did not expect, when we started doing February in Manchester, is that the kids developed a real fondness for the weather. Not in spite of it. Because of it. Jack sketches the wet pavements in his Moleskine. Olivia has a particular thing about umbrellas (she calls everything "Mary Poppins-y," which is exhausting). Henry, who is quiet about most things, said to me last winter as we walked to the corner shop in proper rain, "I like that the sky here makes a sound." I have thought about that line for fourteen months.

The Phoenix bookend

We see my parents in Phoenix at Christmas every year and that is the format. They are once-a-year-at-Christmas grandparents, which is not a complaint, just a description. They come out from Phoenix sometimes for a long weekend in spring. The Christmas trip is short — five days — and the kids notice the contrast. Olivia, last year at age seven, said to me at the Phoenix airport on the way home, "Mum, this place doesn't have a winter, it just has a different summer." She is correct. I made the same observation when I left for college, with fewer words and more existential dread.

The honest part of mid-winter break

I am not trying to talk anyone out of skiing. The NoVA ski-week tradition is great and I have friends whose kids have grown up on the slopes at Snowshoe and they are fitter and braver children than mine. We are just not a ski family. We are a Heathrow family in February, and that is what works for us — comfortable in the choice, partly because Tom's mum is 68 and the maths on grandparent-time is not infinite.

The week after we get home from Manchester, I always do laundry for two solid days. Everything smells faintly of Didsbury — the laundry powder his mum uses, the chip shop two streets over, woodsmoke from someone's fire. I drag it out a little bit. Then it is March, the daffodils are coming up in the front yard in Falls Church, and I start thinking about spring break. Three climates, one family, one mid-winter break. We will do it again next year, and the year after that, until the kids are too tall for the borrowed wellies.