Baby, It's Cold Outside
A Ski Week Post
All across Europe, workers and school kids get a week off in February to go skiing. Those Europeans really know how to live, don’t they? In observance of Ski Week, I wrote this post to commemorate one of my top-four favorite seasons.
As I may have mentioned a few times before (tee hee), I grew up in Minnesota, aka the Frozen North. As luck would have it, I happen to love snow and cold. One of my favorite activities here in Switzerland is winter hiking. Cable cars carry us up to where the landscape is stark, the air is chill, the light is soft, and the snow is deep.
We get very little sunshine here—about as much as in northern England—but, as the locals say, “unten grau, oben blau” (gray below, blue above). We seek the sun at higher altitudes, above the clouds. These clear days remind me of the Minnesota winters of my childhood—cold, crisp, and bright.
As anyone who has grown up in northern climes knows, Lorelei Gilmore is correct: You can smell snow. My childhood winter memories are of sledding, snow angels and men, snow fights and forts, cross-country skiing, and collecting snowflakes on our sleeves in a futile attempt to find two alike. There is something about a blanket of soft, pure snow that entices you to dive in and roll around.
We tunneled forts out of massive snowbanks and climbed onto our roof to jump into the drifts below. We had icicle sword fights. On especially cold days, the boys would spit to watch their saliva explode in ice crystals before it reached the ground. We tiptoed on the snow crust as far as we could before we broke through and were buried hip-deep. We laid our mittens, stiff with snow, on the radiator to thaw and dry. Several neighbors had small ice rinks in their back yards, or we could skate down the snow-packed street to the larger rink in the park. Best of all, we skated across frozen lakes. Some of us (not me; there are limits) spent whole days on those lakes ice-fishing and brought back dinner. We learned to turn the wheel in the direction of the skid and to creep up slippery hills in first gear. We engaged in friendly banter with neighbors as we shoveled our driveways. We quenched our thirst with scoops of snow. We listened to the squeaky crunch of snow beneath our boots. Boluses of snow clumped on our cuffs and in our dogs’ fur.
Later on in the season, there was a perverse fascination in watching the snowbanks on the edges of parking lots get progressively smaller, icier, and filthier.1 I always knew that spring was finally on its way when a ring of snowmelt formed at the base of the green ash tree in our front yard. We kids would eagerly rush outside barefoot the moment the last trace of snow had disappeared, oblivious to our moms’ admonitions that the ground was still frozen. (Our moms were right! As Prince knew, “Sometimes it snows in April.”)
Of course, even for lovers of the cold, winter had its downsides. In middle school, PE was outdoors, never mind that it was in the 20s (Fahrenheit! not Celsius!) and we were in T-shirts and shorts. Our gym teacher used to tell us, “Don’t think of it as cold. Think of it as fresh!” I remember the feeling of dread that would descend at the end of winter evenings with friends, as we readied ourselves to leave their warm house and face the frozen night. Savvy dads knew to keep the car batteries in the house overnight and replace them in the mornings so the cars would start. On the playground at recess, we would huddle next to the school to escape the -40 wind chill until shooed away by witchy Mrs. Smith, the teacher aide (who, in retrospect, was probably grumpy because she didn’t like being outside in the arctic blast any more than we kids did).
A generation ago, the part of Switzerland where I live used to be freezing and snowy all winter, but in our five winters here, we have had no more than a handful of snowy days, and it hardly gets cold at all.2 Any snow we get sticks around for at most a day or two, and the occasional freezing fog decorates branches with hoarfrost for a mere hour or so before it all melts away.
The change has happened so quickly that my 2015 Lonely Planet guide to Switzerland—which warns readers about our “cold climate”—is already out of date. I’ve been hearing about ski conditions from a friend’s daughter, who skis every Friday for a school program. This year the kids have had to ski on manufactured snow or on the slushy granules that remain from the rare snowfall. One Friday it rained all afternoon—in January! in the Alps!—and so instead of skiing, the kids rode up and down in the gondola. Who can blame them?
There are some consolations to an early spring. I took these photos of flowers around our neighborhood a couple of weeks ago. The forsythia burst out on the first day of February; then the snowdrops seized the chance to bloom in the woods before the trees leaf out and block the sun’s rays; then the wild crocuses carpeted the hillsides; and now the viburnum trees are perfuming the air.
The flowers are lovely, but I do miss the glittering snow, cozy sweaters, rosy cheeks, frosty windows, foggy breath, deep drifts, and, just, winter.
How about you, readers? Do you love winter? What is your favorite winter memory? Or are you more of a warm-weather person? Please share your thoughts in the comments!
The Tidbit
As readers have no doubt guessed, this week’s title comes from the 1944 song by Frank Loesser. Below is a particularly delightful performance of the song by Michael Bublé and Idina Menzel, which perfectly captures the song’s flirtatiousness:
In recent years there has been all this discourse about how “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” is problematic.3 My daughter told me a joke about it that she had seen online:
Twenty years from now, kids are gonna think “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” is really weird, and we’re gonna have to explain that it has to be understood as a product of its time.
You see, it used to get cold outside.
A few months ago, for the second time in a little more than a decade,4 the USDA shifted the plant hardiness zones north again. Sigh. Maybe a better song for this wintery tidbit is Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi”: “Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone?”
Weirdly, the snowbanks remind me of a kind of cheese I like to buy from a nearby shop. The shop makes balls of fresh cheese, which they age for up to three years. You can buy the cheese at any stage of ripening (but take my advice and don’t buy it when it’s covered in the yucky blue mold). Like those Minnesota snowbanks of days of yore, the cheese starts out pure white, turns pale brownish gray, and finally winds up hard, shriveled, and black—but in a good way! (The shriveled black cheese is my favorite.)
A dear friend is Russian and grew up in even more intense cold than we had in Minnesota. Whenever someone complains about the cold in our hearing, we will grin slyly at each other and shake our heads, thinking—literally—“Oh you sweet summer child.”
I think that the song’s critics are missing the point. The song was written during a time when the culture didn’t allow women to choose to have sex just for fun. So the woman and the man are playfully cooperating in cooking up excuses for why she has to stay over. The Bublé-Menzel duet nicely reflects this mood.
The original hardiness zone map was published in 1974. The mapmakers shifted the zones northward in 1990, again in 2012, and yet again in 2023.
I have to bundle up like a bear to handle the cold, but winter was always my favorite season.
Was.
This reminded me of days playing in the snow as a kid in New England! Not quite as cold as Minnesota, but we had real snow ... Now we have whole winters without it. I remember in I think it was 2016 -- that was the last big winter, with feet and feet of snow, the sidewalks like canyons between piles. I wish we would get more. Maybe another winter like that some year soon. Also thanks for the great Prince song.