Some Thoughts on Winter

Greetings.

The recent Christmas Season has passed into memory.  And as with other years, the best parts were centered around family and eating.

And Christmas-crackers with very stylish headwear.*

It was a great, fun, and wonderful season.  Christa recited a poem to start the Christmas Eve service with the church and we did a fair bit of traveling.  We had different celebrations this year, lengthening the season to three big meals with friends and family.

Some odder than usual...

...and some more crowded.**

Again, it was awesome.
Lots of family time; great food, jokes, laughs, roughhousing with the nephews, etc. We made homemade cookies, eggnog, and pretzels, all with decent results.

When we weren't doing traditional Christmas things, we were in the snow.  That got me thinking (a dangerous habit), "Why snow?"

What follows is an answer of sorts.

Growing up, ours was a family that watched the Olympics.  At a very impressionable age, I watched the great Franz Klammer win the men's downhill in the 1976 Winter Games. It is regarded as the greatest downhill run in history.  Franz Klammer is the man.

So manly that Chuck Norris wears Franz Klammer PJs to bed.***

Really, you should read this:     http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Klammer

And then watch this:     http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYj9kIxAL_o

I'll wait.





Pretty awesome, huh?  At any rate, this may have left an impression on me and my love of alpine skiing, mountains, winter sports, and snow.

Even better when you can share that love with your love.

There is nothing about skiing that isn't great.5*  The views, the adrenaline, the smells5*, the feel of the snow; all of it is fantastic.  It combines the rush of reaction-time athletics with calculating of risks as you plan your line down the mountain.  In this it is a little like auto-racing (in which, incidentally, Franz Klammer was also a champion6*).  It is a massively family-based activity.

Christa at "the wing"7*

Storm days are great 

Bluebird-poweder days are incredible

And some days are just beautiful

There is a feeling, as you push your skis into the run and carve out a turn, like you can accelerate at a rate faster than gravity alone.  It is addictive.  Skiing is a great sport, you can go fast, slow, turn a lot, or just bomb down the run.  You can do it at age 4 and (hopefully) at age 84.  In short, it combines the best of everything we love.

We have recently taken up a new winter activity.  This Christmas, my wise and generous father purchased the Cragos snowshoes.  In some ways it is the opposite of skiing- slow, contemplative, etc.  But they let you hike into some incredibly cool places.  Really, many of the aesthetics of skiing carry over to snowshoeing.  You can get to some very beautiful locations.

Like the aptly named Icicle River.

I would not call snowshoeing easy, but we were reasonably proficient in short order.

Reasonably

It has been a wonderful Winter.  Busy enough to keep me from blogging, anyway.8*  We are so very thankful for our family, extended and otherwise, and for our friends.  And given the readership for this blog, if you are reading this- then you are a friend!

Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and God Bless You.

* Dad wasn't too impressed with the headgear.

** That's our niece Amber and her kids at nephew Josh's home.  This was the slowest anyone moved all day.

*** Klammer has a bear rug in his home.  The bear isn't dead, it's just too afraid to move. 4*

4* I can do this all night (When Franz does push-ups, he's actually pushing the Earth down)

5* Except people smoking on the chairlift.

6* Franz once fought Superman.  The loser had to wear his underwear outside of his pants.

7* A B-24 went down in the 1940s at Mission Ridge.  There is a memorial marker at the top of a run (patting the wing brings good snow).

8* And that's your apology, 'Niecer.