No Winter Shaming!

Winter Enough with the Shaming!

Have you ever been to Winter Carnival in Québec? My husband Charlie and me have been a couple of times and lived to tell the tale. It’s worth the trip just to see those ice sculptures. And the parades and fireworks. Wow! Throw in the great food, outdoor music and dancing, and a hot alcoholic beverage called “Caribou” (goes down smooth and packs a punch), and you start looking at winter in a whole new way!

It’s kind of like the Down Home Holiday Festival where I live in Mahoosuc Mills, Maine, only tons bigger. Our town is decorated real cute and all the stores are open. There’s a horse-drawn sled for the kids out in Bucky DuMont’s field. And on Enchanted Mountain—the bunny slope with a rope tow at the edge of town— the Rotary club makes an ice slide, and there’s a toboggan race, helmets required. When you’re tobogganing in Québec, you get to look at that beautiful Hotel Frontenac, of course. Our run drops off near the transfer station. Don’t matter, it’s still fun. Each of our toboggan teams have a theme, complete with costumes. This year, the Bouchard brothers won with their Yellow Submarine theme with all of them dressed as the Beatles!

In Maine, a lot of the fun festivals are centered around the holidays when you’re too flat-out busy to go. We need something to do in the dead of winter besides swapping crockpot recipes and waiting for mud season. Some towns are leading the charge, like Portland with their Carnaval Maine, Auburn’s WinterFest, the Family Ice Fishing Derby in Harrison. Still, we could learn a lot from Québec’s Carnaval about not just enjoying winter, but getting out there and embracing it.

Let’s create some winter celebrations of our own. Heck, we have the clothes for it, and plenty of snow and ice. Because of COVID-19, lots of restaurants built patios and put in those little heaters. And doesn’t just about every town have a craft brewery? We’re more than halfway there. Now, if we could just move Thanksgiving to March! n

If you’ve got it, flaunt it.

BY SUSAN POULIN (AS IDA)

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