Snowy Paper­boxes

Cana­di­ans love to brag about how cold it is, and how win­ters are get­ting warmer, and how they sur­vived what­ever storm ten years ago, and how they went to school even though there were over two meters of the white stuff (white stuff = snow for us — not cocaine). I used to make fun of them. But truth is, weather is Canada is a cul­tural thing and it’s hard to avoid indulging in the brag­ging game. This is my forth win­ter here. So I fig­ured I’m almost a win­ter author­ity myself. Let me show you:

• Cana­dian win­ters are hard to describe if you have never expe­ri­enced truly cold weather (above zero degre is not cold by our stan­dards). The cold isn’t humid: it doesn’t get to your bones lit­tle by lit­tle. But right when you step out, you feel the cold bit­ing you strong. As I wrote a year ago in Cold Crash Course, your mus­cles are tense, your breath (or what is left of it) floats into a tiny cloud above you and you feel almost anes­thetized. Skin that it’s not cov­ered beg for mercy. But when you go indoor again, you feel warm right away. Weird, I know.

• Cana­di­ans fear noth­ing but the wind chill. Accord­ing to Wikipedia, wind chill is “the appar­ent tem­per­a­ture felt on exposed skin due to the com­bi­na­tion of air tem­per­a­ture and wind speed”. Basi­cally, for any given — already cold — tem­per­a­ture, the wind makes it feel colder than it always is. For exam­ple, you can see –20C on the ther­mome­ter, but it will actu­ally feels like –35C on your skin.

• Our Gods are the weather chan­nel and Envi­ron­ment Canada’s weather office. We wait reli­giously for warn­ings such as these ones (just got them a minute ago):

Thanks to these warn­ings, I know I won’t go out tomor­row and I’ll pray that some of the ?%$#$ snow will be cleared by Mon­day morn­ing. Although, I’m real­is­tic too: I know it won’t. Even for Canada, 40 cm of the white stuff is a lot. Oh well.

• The salt spread on roads to melt the snow destroys every­thing, from shoes (holes in your soles) to pants (white strips or dried salt), from your lungs (irri­tates your throats) to the asphalt (bumpy trips ahead!). But at least, side­walks and roads aren’t too slip­pery. Just full of pot­holes. Oh, and don’t get stuck behind a salt truck. Your usual trip back home can become the trip from hell… your car cov­ered of snow and an aver­age speed of 10 km/ hr is my def­i­n­i­tion of hell.

• We have to dress in lay­ers from head to toes to trap the body heat. Typ­i­cally, that includes wear­ing: two pairs of socks, snow boots, a warm coat (usu­ally water­proof), gloves, a scarf cov­er­ing mouth and nose and some kind of hat. We wear under­wear too, pervert.

• We like to cel­e­brate sub-zero tem­per­a­tures and waist-high snow­drifts by orga­niz­ing great win­ter fes­ti­vals. In Ottawa, we have the Win­ter­lude in Feb­ru­ary (can’t be before — it wouldn’t be cold enough, ya know!). Fes­ti­vals includes ice carv­ing and ice sculp­tures, tobog­gan­ing in slides made of snow and eat­ing maple tof­fees. We’re freez­ing our butt off, but we are cool with that.

• When our freezer of fridge is full, we just put the food out­side, on the backyard’s deck. It’s usu­ally between 0C and –20C so it’s even colder than our fridge!

Related arti­cles:

1. In The Dead of the Winter
2. Through The Storm
3. Not Win­ter Already…
4. Win­ter In Canada
5. Pic­ture of the Week: Snow Melting