Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Favorite Winter Activity Growing Up

After a couple of weeks of "classics", Randy Seaver has a new topic this week for Saturday Night Genealogy Fun.

Here is your assignment, if you choose to play along (cue the Mission:  Impossible! music, please!):

(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.

Thank you to Linda Stufflebean for suggesting this topic.

I grew up in warm-weather areas — Los Angeles County; Sydney, Australia; and Florida — so the types of things that people think of as "winter activities" weren't usually something we did.  Sure, we might get some rain (and it actually can get below freezing in the Florida Panhandle, which is where I used to live), but overall not the kinds of locations that come to mind when you say "winter."  Neither of my parents were into ice skating or skiing, so we didn't go anywhere to do that.

But while my family lived in Los Angeles County (we were there until 1971), we did have a tradition for at least a couple of years where my father and Uncle Tony (not really our uncle, but a close friend of my father) drove up to Mount Baldy (which I've just learned is officially named Mount San Antonio; never heard that name before!) in a pickup truck and filled the truck bed with snow.  They then brought the snow back to the house, and we were able to play with it for a while before it melted.  I don't remember if it lasted long enough for us to make anything resembling a snowman, though!

As a young adult I lived in California again, actually in Los Angeles, so it was still pretty temperate in the winter.  I think the closest thing I had to a winter activity was spending Christmas break visiting my parents while I was still in college.  At least that's all I can remember now.