Saturday Night Genealogy Fun - Favorite Winter Activity Growing Up

Randy Seaver of Genea-Musing has another challenge for our Saturday night.  Our assignment is:

1)  Winter arrives this month all over the northern hemisphere, and the daily routines of work, education and play change along with the seasons. 

2)  What were your favorite winter activities when you were a child and teenager and young adult?

3)  Share your memories on your own blog post, in a Facebook post, or in a comment on this post.  Please leave a link as a comment on this post if you write your own blog post so that everyone can read all about it.

Living in sunny California, we had few days of really cold weather or even rainy weather, though I remember it raining a lot more when I was in elementary school than it does now. Winter days meant wearing sweaters or sweatshirts to keep warm and maybe a windbreaker to keep the rain off. We didn’t have heavy winter coats or even umbrellas. 

I do have some memories of winter activities.

Snow

Mt. Diablo sometimes gets a sprinkling of snow and once my father picked us up from school early and drove to the summit so we could play in the snow. Boy it was cold. We were probably wearing only sneakers and sweaters (and us girls probably in dresses-though I hope we had gone home to change into pants).

Fog

Every December, we would get this thick fog called “tule fog” that settled low in valleys. Sometimes it was so thick you couldn’t see the houses across the street. I always associated this thick fog with Christmas, because it settled in for days just at the holiday time, making the air cool. It was fun going to Christmas tree lots with the fog swirling around us.

Rain

We lived on a slight hill and there were gutters of dirt alongside the street. Once when it rained, my mother had us make walnut shell boats. We melted wax to put in a toothpick with a sail into the shell. Once it stopped raining, my brother and I went out to sail our boats in the stream of the gutter. Rainy days at home also meant that Mom would either find crafty things for us to do or play board or card games with us. Rainy days often meant a big pot of soup was cooking on the stove and perhaps cookies baked in the oven.

The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Print Collection, The New York Public Library. "Mother songs: cards depicting mother and children in a field with flowers and trees, on stage, going to school, in the wind, rain and snow." New York Public Library Digital Collections. Accessed December 1, 2018. http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47db-c148-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99

Copyright © 2018 by Lisa Suzanne Gorrell, My Trails into the Past. All Rights Reserved.