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Snow Packs a Wallop for Young Harbor Visitors : Ventura: A machine generates eight tons of the white, cold stuff for Santa’s Day at the seaside attraction. The flakes were flying most of Saturday.

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SPECIAL TO THE TIMES

Eyes wide with wonder, 4-year-old Erin Deborba made a chilling discovery Saturday.

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Snow.

Barelegged and bewildered, the Oxnard girl stood paralyzed, one of the many California babies, born and raised under perpetually sunny skies, encountering their first snow.

But while she puzzled over the foreign substance, other initiates took less time acclimating to the cold, slippery stuff.

Within moments of setting eyes on his first snow, 3-year-old Mitch Bluman of Canoga Park had figured out what to do with it.

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Imitating the youngsters around him, he bent over, grabbed a chunk of packed snow, and let it rip.

Snowballs--big, stinging, icy ones--were the order of the day.

There were no rules.

Children hurled them at adults, who joined in the fray.

Ice chunks found their way down the backs of T-shirts, while sprays of the slush caught many in the face.

“I think this is a real Christmasy thing to do,” said Ojai resident Jo Wright. “It’s a wonderful little winter wonderland in Ventura County.”

Wright surprised her grandson, Austin, with the trip to Ventura Harbor Village to see the snow, about eight tons of which was manufactured at 10 a.m. by a snow machine from the North Hollywood Ice Co. as part of the seaside tourist attraction’s Santa’s Day.

When told he was in for a Christmas surprise, the 8-year-old imagined he was on his way to Chuck E. Cheese.

“This is better,” he proclaimed. “It’s cold, but fun.”

Like many of his cohorts, Austin hadn’t expected snow to be so--well, cold.

Four-year-old Travis Jones took to molding one snowball at a time, throwing at an unsuspecting target and then running back to his mother screaming, “Warm my hands, warm my hands.”

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After a vigorous hand massage from mom, he was ready to enter the fray again.

But as the day wore on and the soft flakes melted into a substance akin to crushed ice, some children’s fascination with the slippery stuff waned.

After creating a miniature snowman, that melted along with the pile, Miranda Smith of Ojai couldn’t take it anymore.

“Why isn’t there anything to put on my hands?” she asked her father, David. “My hands are cold.”

Ten-year-old Sara Serota of Oxnard also was frustrated.

“My hands are too pink,” she said. “And I wish it weren’t so hard. It hit me too much and it hurt.”

But despite the cold and the fierceness of hard, ice-packed snowballs, most parents couldn’t pry their children away from the magical pile of slush.

As 9-year-old Ernest Stein, one of the few children appropriately dressed in a snowsuit, hurled snowballs, his mother, Ann Marie, took her time slurping an ice-cold drink.

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“We’re from Connecticut,” she said. “I came here to get away from this.”

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