A former Munising resident is going viral on social media after a post she made with her family during the Christmas blizzard. Sarah Wills braved the Christmas blizzard to perform a parody of the Weather Channel’s extreme weather coverage, right here in Downtown Munising.
The video has over 120,000 views on TikTok with another 70,000 on Facebook. Combined, it has approximately 16,000 likes and interactions. Modest statistics compared to posts regarding the local tourism industry, but this is a first for posts showcasing some of the other types of winter weather received in the area. Wills picked Munising’s Bayshore Park specifically to showcase some of the high winds in the area as part of a “storm surge”, but it did not make it into the video.
Wills credits her niece and nephew Ireland and Cooper Anderson for their help in the video. Ireland operated the camera while Cooper can be seen in the background diving head first into the snowbank.
“At the end of the day it was just coming down to a great time with my niece and nephew. I don’t live there any more so that was the whole point of it was to have fun together,” Wills said.
She said Cooper willingly took on the role, but ran into a snag when he couldn’t get warm right away.
“We were trying to figure out what to do when he put on his bathing suit and volunteered to jump in,” she said. “Towards the end of the video when I start laughing, it was because Cooper was trying to run to the truck, but he fell, so I started laughing. He was jumping up and down and trying to get in the truck while I was still filming, so behind the camera person it was pretty funny to watch him not get into the truck.”
While she left her makeshift microphone kitchen spoon in her father’s ladle drawer, Wills is now back in her new residence just outside Columbus, Ohio. She has no intent on making this Weather Channel spoof a regular thing, but she is proud of her time spent with her family and the happiness the video brought others in a less-than-ideal holiday.
“I wanted to be able to laugh and have a good time. The holidays are stressful, so the kids and I always do something fun. The fact that I brought joy to people, especially when they were stranded in their houses, was really cool,” she said.
