Why I Love Winter

The reason I love winter, is as a child we would come together more as a family. During spring, summer, and fall I would spend long hours outside doing what most children do, playing either by myself or with my friends.

During late fall and winter months my family would be force to come into the house sooner and more often, not that there weren’t just as many fun things to do in the house all year around, but most of my family loved the great out doors. So if we could be outside we would be.

As a child, my parents and grandparents would play games, put puzzles together, and read from the bible, while we would all sat around our big warm fireplace with a cozy fire crackling the wooden logs. We would build snowmen, and then come inside for hot chocolate, and homemade cinnamon rolls fresh out of the oven.

Our families would gather at our home for Thanksgivings, and Christmases. My dad and uncles would move all the living room furniture to the side so sleeping bags could be brought in from our camper, and we would have wall-to-wall cousins as well as ourselves lined up throughout our living room. Our kitchen would be over flowing with cooks, making all kinds of food, and wonderful desserts for the holiday meals.

All of the adults would chat and talk about their childhood out on the prairie, with my grandparents chiming in from time to time to relate their own stories from their own childhood, about crossing the states in a covered wagon, with oxen instead of horses, or how they would have to go to the outhouse in the middle of the night with three feet of snow blocking the doors. They would tell about the dust bowl days, and teaching school to their own children because they would be unable to get the kids to the closest school for weeks at a time because of freezing temperatures.

It is truly amazing how far the world has come in just a little over one hundred years. My grandparents were born in eighteen-eighties and nineties, just years after the civil war. As a young man my grandfather fought in World War I, I had three uncles that fought in World War II. All these were stories I heard about during the winter months. They lived in the days of the covered wagons, automobiles, airplanes, jets, and watched the first rocket land on the moon. They lived through hauling water out of a creek, and wells, to plumbing water throughout their homes. They live through no lights to television; my grandma even saw the first wave of the computer and electronic games. The games she declared were pure evil, because you didn’t need anyone else with you to play them. (Games should be made to bring families together not separate them.)

So much had changed during their lifetime, and I was in our kitchen listening to every word. To me winter was a time of learning not just in school, but also from the history my family had lived through.

Grandma did not just watch ‘Little House on the Prairie’ or ‘The Walton’s’, but she had actually lived through those shows. Through the winter months while watching those shows on television, grandma would pipe in with, that little house looks better then the old ‘Soddy’  (sod home) we lived in while on the prairie. That car look like the first one Ed bought in nineteen-eighteen just before Evelyn was born?

Now my grandparents are gone, as well as my mom, who just passed last month, but memories of winters spent will live on in my mind to tell my children and grandchildren all the stories they had to share, with me as a child. I hope my home will be filled with as much love, memories and family as we use to have in my parents home when I was just a kid. These are the reasons I love winter.

The snow seemed whiter, the wind less cold, and our home seemed warmer with the stories they told.Ó