Spring Time in December

The Christmas trees are up and decorated, the houses and trees are lit up nightly, and the stockings have been hung by the fireplace with care. The malls are jammed with stressed out shoppers, the lucky few have already bought and wrapped their gifts, and the college football bowl season is underway. Yes, it’s beginning to look a lot like…spring time?

Here in the Northeast, it certainly doesn’t seem like it’s the end of December this year. It actually feels more like spring than winter. Daytime temperatures have been in the high-40’s to mid-50’s, instead of the 30’s. It’s even gotten up to 60 degrees around here! For those that use the Celsius scale, that would be temperatures in the 7 – 15 range. In December! While it has gotten cold a few days, I’ve worn my winter jacket only about 5 times this year. And instead of snow on the ground, the grass is still green. It looks like we’re not going to have a white Christmas this year.

As an adult getting along in years, this really doesn’t bother me. I don’t need to drag out the snow blower or shovel the driveway to be able to go somewhere. I don’t even need to scrape frost off the car windows on the majority of mornings. I don’t need to bundle up to just get the mail from the mailbox and I don’t shiver through the first 10 minutes of my daily commute to and from work. If this is the result of global warming, then bring it on because I could get used to winters like this.

As a kid, however, I would have been going out of my mind, maybe even devastated. Winter break from school would be coming up and there’d be nothing to look forward to. There would be no way we’d be playing ice hockey at the pond from early morning to the time darkness made it impossible to see the black puck any longer. The only pause in the games would be enough time to go home and eat some lunch and slightly thaw out the feet and hands. If it wasn’t cold enough to freeze the ponds, there would be no way we’d be spending most of the day sledding down the big hill in the back of my house, punctuated by a hot chocolate break and finishing up warming next to a roaring fire, because there wouldn’t be any snow.

Sure, we would have found stuff to do. We would have probably played street hockey for a few hours, perhaps switched over to football since the grass wouldn’t have been rock hard, and maybe even rode our bikes somewhere since it wouldn’t have been so cold. But it wouldn’t have been the same. Winter break from school was meant to be spent freezing our little behinds off, doing stuff in the snow or on the ice – and we liked it that way! I don’t remember any of us even hinting that it was too cold to go outside during our time off from school in December.

I have no shame in saying that I’m enjoying the holiday season so far. I don’t need a pile of snow and below zero temperatures to feel the joy of the season, and I certainly don’t need to get numb by running out to the mailbox to know that Santa is on his way. This year, I’m dreaming of a green Christmas. Let it rain, let it rain, let it rain!

Happy Holidays and Happy New Year!

Spring Already?

I know it’s only mid-March, but spring is in the air. It’s not just because Spring Training for baseball is up and running, or because the NHL regular season is coming to an end, or because there’s about 20,000 birds in my yard and its surroundings every morning. It’s mostly due to the mild winter we’ve had. It really already feels like spring.

I’ve enjoyed this winter. I haven’t used the snow blower once this season and I’ve only had to shovel snow twice, and that was more like pushing the light, fluffy snow off the driveway. It hasn’t been very cold either, with only a few days where the temperatures have been below 20 degrees. If this is the effect of global warming, then bring it on! I could handle ten more just like this one. Of course, this is from my perspective as a middle-aged man. As a kid I would have absolutely hated this winter.

The ponds near my house never even froze this winter. Well, maybe they got a thin layer of ice on the top, but they never froze enough for any winter activities. There was no ice fishing this winter, no snowmobiles racing across the ice and snow, and most importantly, no ice skating. Hockey on the frozen ponds was one of the major things that got me through winter as kid. We’d race home from school, dump the books, get our gear and get an hour or two in before it was too dark to see in front of you. On weekends we’d be at the pond from 9am until it was dark, with a quick break for lunch around noon. I don’t think there was ever a winter we didn’t get in a lot of pond hockey from November to March. That would have been unthinkable.

We also got a lot more snow than we do now. If the ponds were buried beneath a pile of snow, we’d shovel it off or use sheets of plywood and push it out of the way to make an area big enough for a decent game. Snow really didn’t stop us, unless there was just too much to move and then we’d wait a few days or a week and then move the snow. While we were waiting, we’d be sledding, building snow forts for snowball fights or playing street hockey when the road was clear. If we missed a day or two of school, even better! That left us more time to be doing fun stuff. At least it was fun then; now, not so much. 

I just can’t imagine going through the whole winter as a kid and not being able to go sledding, have snowball fights or play ice hockey. Street hockey wasn’t a bad short-term solution, but it was nowhere near as good as ice hockey. If you’ve ever been hit by one of those orange street hockey balls or pucks when it is cold outside, you know what pain is. Maybe that's why we used tennis balls that had lost their bounce. Somehow, getting hit with a puck while playing ice hockey never seemed as bad as getting hit with one of those street hockey balls. Sledding down our own Mount Everest was always fun, as was the hot chocolate and roaring fire when we were done. Those were the carefree days of childhood.

But as the temperature outside climbs into the 60’s and there’s not even a hint of any snow around my area, I just have to smile. There’s no sadness here on my part. I don’t skate on the ponds anymore, I haven’t gone sledding since the kids were little and the last time I had a mini snowball fight my shoulder hurt for two days. Honestly, I’d rather be sitting on the back deck in the warm sunshine than be sitting in a cold pile of snow after slipping and falling. These are the not-so-carefree days of adulthood. Call it the year without a winter or just an early spring, it makes no difference. Spring is in the (warm) air.   

Outdoor Hockey

I’m a life-long hockey fan so on New Year’s Day I watched the NHL Winter Classic. For those of you who don’t know what the Winter Classic is, it is a professional hockey game played outdoors, either in a football or baseball stadium. The games have been played in Buffalo, Chicago, Boston and this year’s game was in Pittsburgh. There’s been snow (in Buffalo, of course), cold (Chicago and Boston) and now rain. Maybe it was the rain, maybe it was the teams involved, but in my opinion this year’s game was the least entertaining of the four.

I usually don’t watch the pregame shows for sporting events as I find them a little a boring, but I have watched the pregame show for the Winter Classic in previous years. If nothing else, they always run a time lapse video of getting the rink ready to play. In a geeky way, I find it very interesting. They also interview players from each team about playing outside and most of them look back to their childhood, reminiscing about simpler times when it was still just a game. Their thoughts and memories brought back a lot of memories for me, too.

Growing up in Massachusetts in the late 60’s and 70’s, spurred on by Bobby Orr and the Big, Bad Bruins, the men in my family were huge hockey fans. We watched hockey, talked about hockey and played hockey. As soon as the ponds froze over, we were there playing hockey. During the week, a group of us would run home from school, grab our skates, sticks, gloves and a puck, and hustle to the closest pond to get in an hour or so of hockey before darkness set in and we reluctantly went home. As far as we were concerned, the game was on and the homework could wait.

The only thing better was the weekends. Me and my brothers had chores to do before we could go out on Saturdays (mine was to wash the kitchen or dining room floor), but then it was off to the ponds. We’d get there by 9:30 or 10:00, skate until about 1:00, go home for a short lunch and then skate until it was too dark to see a foot in front of you. Then, and only then, we’d begrudgingly trudge home, tired and hungry (again). We might have had a few bumps, bruises or nicks, and we were usually numb from the cold, but we were a happy bunch of kids! If we were lucky, the Bruins were on TV that night and we’d watch the game, imagining ourselves out there on the Garden ice.

One of my all-time, favorite memories of those times was when my friend Bruce decided to go to the pond with us. Now Bruce played street hockey with us, but he wasn’t much of an ice hockey player. So Bruce showed up with his stick with a plastic street hockey blade (using a baseball metaphor, Strike One) and since he didn’t have hockey skates yet, put on his figure skates (Strike Two) and went out on the pond. I think it was one of my older brothers who, noticing the plastic street hockey blade, told Bruce that his stick was going to break because it was so cold. Bruce, however, would hear nothing of it. We started the game and the first time someone passed the puck to Bruce, you guessed it, the plastic blade snapped right off his stick (Strike Three, yer out)! After a few minutes of uproarious laughter and some I-told-you-so’s, the game went on, with Bruce borrowing someone’s spare stick.

That was about the biggest problem we faced back then, broken sticks or dull blades. I can see why the pros had that little twinkle in their eyes when they talked about it. I probably have that twinkle right now, too.