Some of the Debbie Downers in here are forgetting its December 8th.. How are we saying that the rest of the month is horrible and nothing until after Christmas the earliest? If your long range forecasting skills were that good, pretty sure you'd have an important job with NOAA. For now we know that things are unfavorable in the next 5-10 days and thats about it. Every piece of information that we have does in fact say that things slowly start to turn less hostile in the 10-15 and *edit* serviceable to possibly a good pattern in the 15-20. Thats all we know for now. Adding this part in, you don't need the perfect pattern to get snow post December 15th, all we need is to get rid of the hostile pattern.