Let it snow some more

Published 1:58 pm Monday, January 27, 2025

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I love snow! My love of snow started at an early age. I was three years old, when my big sister Libby took me in the front yard of our house to make snowballs. That morning waking up with snow on the ground, the roof tops covered under a white blanket and seeing the tree branches coated turned me into a devoted snow lover and that love has never left.

While I can’t remember large snowfalls every year as I grew up here, I do remember the fun all the kids in my neighborhood had with even a few inches.

When a snow day meant school was closed, that made for a real holiday for us. Seems like every kid on the block’s imagination was working overtime to make the best snow adventures. But first, there were rules of etiquette.

One rule was you could not go into somebody else’s yard to play in the snow before they did. Each kid was supposed to have the pleasure of tracking through the snow in their yard first.

Second, you weren’t supposed to knock icicles down from the roofs of their houses either. It wasn’t much fun to go out into your yard and see that somebody had knocked the icicles down. That would deprive you of the right to claim you had the longest icicles hanging from the roofs. Once you broke them off, icicles could then be dipped in a dry Kool-Aid sugar mixture to make ‘ice pops’, a perfect treat to go with snow cream. Snow cream was made with snow, evaporated milk, vanilla and sugar.

The third and most important rule was the snowball fight etiquette. ONLY snowballs were to be used. No rocks, potatoes or apples could be coated with snow and thrown during the snowball fight. We used bread wrappers between two layers of socks as liners to keep our feet dry. Some kids took off the bread wrappers to put snowballs in, to make ‘snow torpedoes’ that could be hurled at someone. Were the etiquette rules obeyed? Absolutely not! And the best way to avoid the trauma of rule three not being followed, was not to have snowball fights with certain kids on the block.

Snow brought out the architectural skills in the kids. We made snow forts from porch chairs and blankets and igloos shaped in old cigar boxes and stacked into an igloo shape.

Later, the sled races began. Here again the engineering skills of us kids were put to the test, as any household object (with skill) could be made into a sled. The most common was made from the round top lid of those old wringer type washing machines, the kind that had the two rollers on the top that you had to pull the clothes thru to get excess water out of them before you could hang them up to dry. But other effective sleds were made from trash can lids, cafeteria trays, cardboard boxes, big wide metal biscuit or baking pans and inner tubes cut in half. You talk about fun in the snow, we took fun to a whole new level!

I passed that love of fun in the snow on to my children and the many decades of children I taught. On snow days when school was open, I took my classes out to build snowmen, paint the snow using tempera paint and brushes, and let them make ‘snow bubbles,’ (blowing bubbles outside and watching them freeze.) I enjoyed watching them learn to love snow. Oh, and I taught them to do a wonderful snow dance in the hope of getting more snow!