We've done a "guess the first inch of snow contest" for a few years at syracuse.com and The Post-Standard, but I've never had as much fun letting the winners know as I did Thursday, at the Syracuse Academy of Science Charter School.
Each year, we ask readers to make a prediction on when we'll get our first snowfall of at least an inch in greater Syracuse. The winner - the person whose guess either nails the day itself or comes the closest - gets four half moon cookies from Mimi's Bakery and Cafe (believe me, that's a treasure worthy of a king) and a free night of family skating at the Clinton Square ice rink, courtesy of city parks Commissioner Baye Muhammad.
This year, we had an unusual situation: Out of hundreds of entries, the winners - the only two entrants to correctly guess Dec. 22, the day identified by the Northeast Regional Climate Center at Cornell - were both pupils in the first grade class of Anna Szczesniak and Shannon O'Mara, teachers at the Academy of Science who'd asked every child in their classroom to take a guess. We've done the contest for a few years, but it's the first time we ever had children as the winners.
So I put in a call to Szczesniak and O'Mara. They were delighted, and they agreed to keep the contest results a secret until I got a chance to stop by the school and break the news to Lonnie Moore and Mahoniss Graham - the two young winners - and the rest of the class.
Better yet, Gary Nigolian, owner of Mimi's, donated 30 of his legendary half moons, so every child in the classroom could share in the reward.
If you watch the video, captured by our own Ellen Blalock, you'll get a sense of how a roomful of first graders felt about their victory, once they heard the news. Lonnie, asked how he came up with Dec. 22, basically said: Hey, that was a long time ago, and I took a guess.
Mahoniss, however, offered a longer take: She told me her mother suggested a date, and then Mahoniss forgot it, and instead she she put down a day, and then she erased it, and then she came up with another day ...
And, like Lonnie, she hit the right one. Congratulations, kids. Meeting you made my day.