In Seattle, the muscle memory just isn’t there for big snow — whether in deploying salt spreaders and plows or in getting a snow-day reprieve from an algebra test — so the responses, for better or worse, are sharpened by the novelty.

Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington declared a state of emergency, and Seattle’s Emergency Management office urged people to be prepared to lose power if lines go down. Interstate 90 was closed on Sunday morning in both directions east of Seattle because of blowing and drifting snow. Kids and their parents commandeered city streets for sledding, sometimes blocking traffic with homemade signs.

Then there’s frozen pizza. Or perhaps more accurately, there isn’t frozen pizza. The gene for nesting indoors in extreme weather appears to be connected to the gene for pepperoni, so the shelves in the freezer aisle were stripped bare in many stores. Tofu was still widely available.

The National Weather Service said that Seattle, less than halfway into the month, has already had its snowiest February since 1949, after 7.9 inches were recorded at the airport on Friday and Saturday. And three more storms, backed up one behind the other on a slippery slope from Canada, are heading toward the region starting on Monday, said Jacob DeFlitch, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service.

“Right now, we have two systems coming in later Sunday to early Monday,” Mr. DeFlitch said. “Then we have a system right on the heels of that system that will be late mainly Monday afternoon through early Tuesday morning. It looks like there could then be another system Thursday-Friday.”