By The Landlord
"Skiing is the next best thing to having wings." – Oprah Winfrey
"Figure skating is a mixture of art and sport." – Katarina Witt
"Skiing is the best way in the world to waste time." – Glen Plake, extreme skier
"My teacher is the cold. Cold is merciless, but righteous. It shows you where you are. What you are." – Wim Hof
“The only problem with winter sports is – that they generally take place in winter.” – Dave Barry
Soft crunch of foot on glistening grass, and glittery, crinkled leaf. Silvery sheen of new-forming, prettily-patterned ice on puddle, pond or lake. Bright, eggy sun, then full, bright, white winter moon. After a year, and more, of scarily high temperatures and tropical-level rainfall, in many parts of the world, at last, the arrival of a December freeze at least represents some return, for now, of a relative normal. So it's time to turn down the overpriced heating, get wrapped up, take a stiff walk, bring a flask, and embrace the cold. There's no need to go all Wim Hof and dive into that lake in your bare essentials, though that's also an option, but at least we can break the ice with songs that focus on sports, or pastimes, done in the chilly outdoors, often on ice and snow.
Frictionless fun or scarily fast slipping? It's up to you. So that includes, for starters, songs that may mention, literally or metaphorical skating and skiing of all types, downhill, cross country, as well as ski jumping and snowboarding, to ice hockey, indoor or outdoor. Or the even icier and speedier dangers of bobsleigh, luge, skeleton, wok racing (yes, really), to the crazily clean but not always gentile sport of curling, ice's answer to crown green bowls but with added frantic brushing and buffing. It's all there to enjoy and sometimes fall head over heels (in glove if not love) with.
Winter sports often lead us to crash and smash into each other like hockey hoodlums. But there's no need to get too Tonya Harding about it, though she herself has been celebrated in song. There's also art to this too, from the elegant spins of Katerina Witt to the perfect scores of Torvill and Dean. Skating often slides into romance, with those other intertwining skating pairs, such as Belousiova and Protopopov, Tarasova and Morozov, Gordeeva and Grinkov, or Knierim and Knierim. Skating pairs must perform like musicians with instinctive mutual understanding, stamina, skill and precision.
Torvill and Dean, skating’s answer to the perfect vocal duo
But winter sports can get stranger, slippier, more specialised,sometimes sillier. In the rink that might include the hockey cousins – ringette, broomball, bandy or spongee.
And often winter activities can come where sport and ancient life survival collide, where leisure and tradition are celebrated and combined. Snow snake is a Native American winter sport traditionally played by many tribes in the Great Lakes region, including the Ojibwe, Sioux, Wyandotte, Oneida and other Haudenosaunee people who competitively slide long javelin-like hunting sticks or spears across snow and ice to see how who can get the furthest.
For extra lift, barrel jumping is a speed skating 'discipline', if that's not an inappropriate word for a sport in which you try to leap over a line of multiple barrels before inevitably landing on your arse and crashing. In 1925 American speedskater Edmund Lamy set a record of 14 barrels at Saranac Lake, New York, leaping 27ft 8in (8.4 metres). Not for want of trying, it wasn't, well, broken until 1981, when the current world record of a whopping 18 barrels (29ft 5in or almost 9 metres) was leapt by Yvon Jolin of Canada.. Looks like a barrel of laughs back in the day. Roll out the barrel ...
Eccentrically, winter sports can sometimes be more leisurely adaptations of the fair-weather normal. Snow golf, snow bowling, snow cricket or snow rugby, anyone? They all exist, but I'm not sure they really count for this song topic, unless of course, they are really played in the snow or on the ice. Snow canoeing is hard-going competitive sport that often is more about dragging, than paddling. But tobogganing certainly counts, is a leisure version of bobsleigh, and on the flat, dog sledding is also in the running, showing how this week's topic is where work, play and competition all slide together, and as with all of these activities can be literally or metaphorically referred to in song.
Building snowmen, making snow angels, or writing your name in the snow might class as winter pastime activities, but snowball fights would certainly count. These aren't always spontaneous. SheenAab Jung is the name for organised snowball fighting in Jammu and Kashmir cultures, while yukigassen is a fully competitive snowball event, its name derived from Japan combining the words yuki (snow) and kassen (battle). It's particularly popular in that country as well as Finland.
Throwing snowballs at each other is as old, and as universal as snow itself. Here's a painting by Venceslao, from around 1400, of a fun scene at Castello del Buonconsiglio, Trento, Italy.
Detail from Venceslao’s painting of Castello del Buonconsiglio, Trento, Italy, circa 1400
And with a beautiful restoration, some Lumiere Brothers footage of a snowball fight in Lyon in 1896:
Central heating and modern life has made us go a bit soft, after all. When Charles Dickens was a child, he recalled six winters when the Thames had completely frozen over. This was often norm during the period prior to that. That famous river was less banked, was also wider and shallower than it is today, making it easier to freeze, but it was regularly significantly colder in winter. Dickens' life was towards the end of a period of what's known as the Little Ice Age, which may have begun as early as the 14th century, but conventionally ran from the 16th to the mid 19th centuries, ending in around 1850. The winter of 1708-09, for example, was known as The Great Frost, or Le Grand Hiver in France, a devastating season that was coldest European winter during the past 500 years, killed hundreds of thousands through famine and caused mass migration. We are currently in an unprecedented period of global warming.
Warming warnings …
So for centuries, life was harder, but many generations of our ancestors expected, and were more used to the cold. River- and lake-based frost fairs with market stalls, skating, pin bowling or skittles, made up a big part of life for commerce, leisure and pleasure. So let's close this introduction with some more images from the past, as well as the more recent present, and see how, as a species, we've come in from the cold, but sometimes might, with artistry, invention and a little hardy bravery, might also enjoy going back into it.
Detail from Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s famous Hunters In The Snow, 1565
Poem on winter outdoor pastimes on the frozen Thames, 1715
It’s all downhill from here …
Breathe with Wim Hof …
So don your gloves and scarves, and put your winter sports and pastimes songs in the comment boxes below. Our guest smiling snowman of selection is the marvellous Marconius, aka Marco den Ouden. The bell rings for hot toddy and other winter warmers at 11pm UK time on Monday for playlist published next week. Show us your breath, and your breadth.
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