Stories of My Childhood: Winter Fun

I lived in the perfect spot for winter fun when I was growing up. There was a small pond directly across the street from our house that was a great ice skating pond. We lived at the bottom of a cul-de-sac, so my sister and I could lace up our skates in the warmth of the kitchen, then put on our skate guards and carefully walk on the edge of the neighbor's lawns and down through the reedy bank to reach the ice. There were enough hockey-loving boys in the neighborhood that someone had usually shoveled the snow off a good-sized patch of ice by the time we were ready to skate. My mom could see us from the living room window, so we didn't even have to wait until one of my folks was available to chaperone us after we reached a certain age. My dad was a pretty good skater, so he spent hours skating backwards, first holding us up and dragging us across the ice and eventually just helping us with balance a little. Finally he showed us how to spin around so WE were skating backwards and HE was skating forwards. Neither my sister nor I was ever going to be a candidate for the Ice Capades, but we certainly learned to keep ourselves upright and even be reasonably graceful on the ice.

If we were in the mood to sled rather than skate, we had a small sledding hill right in our own backyard. At the back of our house, the yard was flat for a ways (enough space for a large clothesline and a small swing set), then there was a hill about 20 feet across and maybe 6 feet tall that led to an upper section of yard that had space for a full-sized volleyball court or croquet game, plus a generous-sized vegetable garden. It was just a little hill so you only got a short ride on the sled, but the up side was that it wasn't that hard or time-consuming to pull your sled back to the top for your next run. We had a series of different styles of sleds over the years, mainly something called a "Slide-a-Boggan" that was just a big thin plastic rectangle with a handle at the front that rolled up like a carpet to store it in the garage.

But my favorite sled was the big aluminum "flying saucer" with two canvas handholds, kind of like a very smooth trashcan lid. 

We sometimes waxed the bottom with the same chunk of paraffin that my dad used on the aluminum snow shovels to stop the soft snow from sticking. That sled was fun because not only did you slide down the hill very fast, you also spun around like a top while going down!

But the best and biggest sledding hill in town was right up the street. 

[Author's Note: This is the actual hill I sledded on as a child.]

Technically we could have walked there from our house, but we usually drove because that's where we went sledding when both my parents came along and we brought the toboggan. It was a beautiful, long, shiny wooden sled that was big enough for the whole family, and it even had a steering mechanism of sorts (although one of somewhat dubious effectiveness). 

We always stacked in weight order, with Dad at the back, then mom, then my sister, and finally me at the front, with my muffler carefully wrapped across my face so I didn't end up with a faceful of snow by the time we reached the bottom (also of somewhat dubious effectiveness). Due to the weight of all four of us, the toboggan tended to get bogged down unless the snow was either very well packed or quite icy, which meant the perfect conditions for SPEED! The hill was high enough that you built up quite a bit of speed by the bottom, and there wasn't a lot of straightaway to slow you down before you reached a few bushes and then slid directly into the street, or at least the parked cars lining it. I never heard of anyone going into the street and getting hurt, but I suspect that more than a few cars every winter gained a dent on the lower part of the passenger side door. When it wasn't icy enough for the toboggan, we would often bring two sleds and tandem down, usually me with Dad and my sister with Mom. (I suspect the main reason for the tandem was that I was little enough to struggle with climbing back to the top of the hill, and my dad preferred to manage one sled and one small child rather than two sleds and one small child.)

Of course, the best part of any of these outings was getting back home and having hot cocoa. If Mom hadn't been outside with us, she would see us coming and start making the cocoa while we peeled off all our winter gear. That usually consisted of a bulky parka, heavy snow pants with suspenders, mittens on a string running through the sleeves so we wouldn't lose them (or at least we'd lose both of them at once), a knitted snow hat (made by the loving hands of one of my grandmothers), and a long scarf. If we were sledding, our feet would be warmly layered in two pairs of socks, a Wonder Bread bag with the top folded over so the red, yellow, and blue polka-dots showed, and finally our snow boots.  

[Author's Note: These are not my actual feet.]

By the time we had extricated ourselves from all those layers, the cocoa had been poured into a big mug and topped with either marshmallows or a large dollop of Marshmallow Fluff, and was often accompanied by a freshly baked cookie. What part of childhood could possibly be better than that??