BELL CURVE:

I spent a White Christmas last week with my youngest daughter, Debby, in Boulder, Colo.

It has been many years since I’d gone to bed at night under a cloudless sky and awakened in the morning to discover a virgin white blanket of snow outside my bedroom window. It had arrived stealthily in what Carl Sandburg describes as “little cat feet” while I slept.

I had forgotten the magnificence of that first pristine view. It would become treacherous ice and, later, miserable slush, but to this converted Californian by way of Chicago, there was only beauty at the start — before the snow shovels and the street plows were cracked out to allow us to get about.

There are two climate phenomena that make me remember with powerful nostalgia my roots in the American Midwest: the early fall weeks of Indian summer and the white expanse of virgin snow. The rest of the year I’m perfectly happy to walk the beach or fire up my outside grill.

I’ve been making this Christmas junket to Boulder for more than two decades, so traditions have been established and changes are looked on with suspicion.

The major change this year was the addition of a cellphone to my carry-on. I’ve resisted owning a cellphone with the same dinosaur determination — if not the same reasons — I resisted the electric typewriter and the computer.

I find the cellphone both a danger on the road and an invasion of privacy, especially when used by someone else in your hearing.

The cellphone makes it impossible to ever be truly alone. But after I lost a $3,000 hearing aid while trying to use a pay phone, my progeny bought me a cell and demanded that I use it.

So there I was in the Denver airport while my daughter was driving around waiting for me to call her on my new cellphone. I was astonished when it worked, so I’m probably stuck with carrying it when I go out.

The other break with tradition was the announcement that Tom’s Tavern would shutter its doors on Christmas week and never open them again.

Tom’s was the only place west of Columbia City, Ind., I’ve been able to get a properly deep-fried breaded pork tenderloin sandwich, and it will be missed terribly.

Otherwise tradition held. I bought the Christmas tree at the same hardware store we always get it, enjoyed a martini each evening with Debby, who persists in drinking a pink concoction called a cosmopolitan, ate at Tom’s and Mustard’s Last Stand, had lunch with my former son-in-law who is a Boulder attorney, bought and wrapped the Christmas gifts I would leave behind, and talked and talked with my daughter whom I see only a few times each year.

Coming home was an adventure. The weather forecast that told me I’d be leaving Denver a day ahead of another storm front turned out to be wrong.

On the long drive to the airport from Boulder, the snows returned and the cloud ceiling seemed low enough to touch. To further complicate matters, I had taken the latest flight possible with only a 15-minute window between its arrival time and our airport shutting down for the night.

My wife and I had stretched our luck this way once before and ended up at midnight in Los Angeles looking for a ride home. This time in the near-deserted Denver airport, an anxious clutch of passengers waited to see if we were going to get off in time to avoid that situation — or at all.

We did both, partly because the departure time was moved up by a half-hour, which left me wondering what happened to the passengers who arrived at the last minute.

I didn’t give much thought to this question until I was safely aboard and the doors were secured.

The flight was routine, but we arrived in a lifeless John Wayne (God, I hate that name for an airport), an eerie place when it is empty of all but cleaning people. I had to make a run for the men’s room, which seemed a mile away since the toilet facilities for half the airport have been closed for renovation roughly since California was taken into the union of states.

I connected with my ride home and today faced a mound of newspapers and mail that consists mostly of Christmas cards from commercial firms I patronize and duns from a multitude of charities and pseudo-charities seeking contributions. I’ve given a few bucks to some of them and have thus made their mailing lists, which tap me every few weeks for more money instead of just being grateful for what I’ve already sent — all in the Christmas spirit, of course.

So it is business as usual, with fliers from the people who want me to decide where City Hall should be built, a Christmas tree to buy, and the rigors of shopping to be put off until the last minute.

And, oh yes, my older daughter, Patt, who house-sat two dogs in my home while I was away, surprised me by decorating it magnificently, inside and out, with a multitude of lights that must have startled my neighbors who are accustomed to my one string over the garage door the day before Christmas.

JOSEPH N. BELL lives in Newport Beach. His column runs Thursdays.