Tuesday’s Top 10: Favorite Things to do With Snow

Some people hate it. Some people love it. Some people move just to avoid it. Some people vacation in it.

That’s right. We’re talking about snow.The wonderful white stuff that I love to see in December and, by the end of February, usually loathe.

These are my favorite things to do in it (well, the first four are – the last one is sort of an end-of-February snowy activity):

1) Snowball fights – there are fewer things more fun than spending an entire day building a couple of snow forts, and then using a 15 minute snowball battle to tear them both to the ground

2) Drive in it – As a married parent of four, I don’t get to experience very much life-threatening excitement. Skydiving, swimming with sharks, going on vacations with Bear Grylls…they all seem like things to do after the kids are in college. The only excitement left for me is to drive into a snow drift at 55 mph and try to control the fish tailing.

3) Eat it – When I was a kid, grandma used to have us go out and get a bowl full of snow, mix in sugar and vanilla flavoring and !presto! a delicious bowl of snow. I recently tried it with the kids. They took one bite and threw their bowls back outside. I tried a bite and had to agree.

4) Sled on it – the Chevy Chase sledding scene from Christmas Vacation is the best sledding scene in the history of movie making.

5) Watch it melt…and see spring come gushing up through it.

So help me fill out the list. What do you like to do with snow?

6 Replies to “Tuesday’s Top 10: Favorite Things to do With Snow”

  1. while climbing mt. rainier, some friends and i made a couch out of it, complete with a cup-holder:

    http://picasaweb.google.com/gregory.gingles/20070728MtRainierGinglesPhotos?authkey=Gv1sRgCLSOzt-9i-WGHw&feat=directlink#5430425952723793698

    that was right after we ran out of water and created stills out of it for getting drinking water:

    http://picasaweb.google.com/gregory.gingles/20070728MtRainierGinglesPhotos?authkey=Gv1sRgCLSOzt-9i-WGHw&feat=directlink#5430425960040781842

    we built a toilet, too, but that picture wouldn’t be appropriate…

  2. I think you need to retry the snow thing, using maple syrup this time — provided it is real maple syrup, not the flavored high-fructose corn syrup Ms. Jemima and Ms. Butterworth try to foist on us.

    “One must have a mind of winter” (Wallace Stevens… you forgot “write poems about it”) to have a snowstorm hit, and subsequently to read Jack London’s “To Build a Fire” without wanting to leap up and crank all of one’s heaters to max.

  3. I have never been much of a snowman builder but I did enjoy creating a couple of massive snow forts when I was a kid. Me and my buddy made one during a blizzard that we were able to take flashlights into because it was so large.

  4. Snowmobiling!

    Living in Southern PA you would have to be partially crazy to have a snowmobile, well that’s me!

    I have and old relic of a sled and it is still fast and was so cheap I couldn’t resist. When I first got married we used to live on a main street (as “main” street as you can get in Intercourse, PA) and I could hear all people flying by our apartment and all the while I was make these mental promises to someday have a sled of my own. When a friend offered me one of his for just $600.00 I did not hesitate. It has been GREAT to have one on standby for all of these years.

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