Year of the Snake. (Hiss….)

While Boston was dealing with the before, during, and after-effects of NEMO, The Great Blizzard of 2013, the Chinese were busily fire-crackering in the Lunar New Year: the Year of the Snake.

For a number of reasons, the Year of the Snake is not especially an auspicious one, making it a tough sell, especially since it follows the uber-auspicious Year of the Dragon.  So last year saw droves of believers trying to get their weddings and babies in while the auspiciousness lasted. And this year, the wedding halls will be empty, and the birth rate down.

But there’s a sometimes overlooked downside to it being the snake’s year that has nothing to do with its lack of awesome auspice. And that’s the fact that the snake doesn’t lend itself to cuteness in the same way that the dragon does. Why even my year – the ox – could, in its stolid plodding way, pull off a bit of cuteness. Maybe not cuteness on the level of the dragon, dog, or rabbit, but certainly the equivalent of the goat or the boar.

But the snake?

Only the Year of the Rat can give the Year of the Snake a run for its money, anti-cuteness-wise. And even the Year of the Rat has the alternative out of being called the Year of the Mouse. And thanks to Walt Disney and Topo Gigio, we are well aware of the potential adorableness of the mouse.

But the snake?

Sorry.

With snakes, we’re talking some powerful cute underload.

Which leaves the stuffed animal producers and vendors somewhat out in the cold.

After all, it’s nigh unto impossible to make a snake – for a variety of reasons starting with the unmentioned and unmentionable obvious – look like something that the kiddies would and should want to cuddle up with.

Look, Ma! No hands! No feet! No nothing!

Evolution-wise, they’re something of an also ran. Far more difficult to anthropomorphize than most critters – even the mythic dragon which, while having a bit of the reptilian about it, still manages to have appendages, rather than to be one.

In some quarters, the snake has been banished altogether. Hong Kong's annual Lunar New Year parade is one of the city's crowning holiday events, and typically the Zodiac animal of the season is out in force, says Mason Hung of the Hong Kong Tourism Board. In 2012, a 100-foot floating dragon made an appearance. The year before that, during the Year of the Rabbit, some 50 children dressed like rabbits charmed the crowd. (Source: WSJ Online)

No surprise there. What parent in their right mind is going to let their kid dress up like a snake?

As for snake madness:

Not this year. Last summer, the city asked a design agency to come up with ways to incorporate a serpent motif. All of the proposals were rejected. "The visual effect was not appealing," said Mr. Hung. "This year, we have tried to do away with snakes and replace them with candies and balloons to create the atmosphere of a street party," he said of the parade, expected to attract some 100,000 spectators.

100,000 spectators who, last year, might have bought a couple of stuffed dragons, but who will likely be going home empty-handed of stuffed animals.

Still, some vendors are giving it a try.

They’ve even come up with these lil’ darlins’. Look closely, and you’ll see that these snakes are fruit-themed: grape, strawberry, watermelon, and pineapple. Yet for all those nifty fruit colors, those precious, twee, wee little faces, it’s hard to disguise their underlying, off-putting snakiness.

Snakes are turning up on shelves and advertisements adorned with bow ties, aviator goggles or Bambi-style eyelashes. In pictures pasted in shop windows, snakes appear swathed in robes, with arms holding flowers, and tails discreetly tucked behind piles of gold ingots. Forked tongues are transformed into hearts.

Personally, I’ve seen snakes turn up adorned, if not with aviator goggles or Bambi-style eyelashes, then with bow ties and swathed in bathrobes. And I say nothing doing, even if their tails are hidden in piles of gold, they’re carrying bouquets in the arms that nature most certainly did not endow them with, and they have forked tongues transformed into hearts. (Yeah, right.)

Other vendors aren’t even trying.

One toy company that churned out 10,000 dragon toys didn’t even bother with snakes. Another came up with the idea of a duck in a snake costume – the snake skin can be stripped off, leaving the fortunate toy-owner with (Peking) duck.

The few, the proud, the aginners are going snake.

One Hong Kong mall, Metroplaza, has embraced the year by installing eight live snakes under a gold arch in a case lined with peony-blossom wallpaper. To open the exhibition, the mall invited two models wearing orchid-strewn hats to pose for photographs with pythons coiled around their arms.

OMG.

If there’s one thing I like even less than a toy snake, it’s a models “wearing orchid-strewn hats…with pythons coiled around their arms.”

Happy Lunar New Year, anyway.