Christmas at Sixty Below

Fairbanks suffered one of its worst recorded cold spells the winter we kept our first Christmas. The temperature hit forty below on Thanksgiving and fell steadily through December.

And it was always at least ten degrees colder in the Flats, a sunken shanty town, two miles from Fairbanks and two miles from the University of Alaska. In winter the Flats is a frozen wasteland, always dark, the ice-fog hanging like a shroud. My husband and I lived in a jerry-built apartment house there. John was a student and rents were cheap.

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Patricia S. Coyne

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Fairbanks suffered one of its worst recorded cold spells the winter we kept our first Christmas. The temperature hit forty below on Thanksgiving and fell steadily through December.

And it was always at least ten degrees colder in the Flats, a sunken shanty town, two miles from Fairbanks and two miles from the University of Alaska. In winter the Flats is a frozen wasteland, always dark, the ice-fog hanging like a shroud. My husband and I lived in a jerry-built apartment house there. John was a student and rents were cheap.