How To Make The Winter Bearable, Part 1

Build a backyard skating rink!
Why you ask?
Check out Jack Falla's explanation:
The question of why to build a rink has less to do with a career in hockey than with the pure joy of skating and playing. Or, as my daughter Tracey, then eight years old, said one morning when Barbara asked her if she wanted to sign up for figure skating lessons at the town rink: "No. I want to have my own fun. Not somebody else's fun." In the matter of personal recreation and casual sport, we find it more enjoyable to descend the evolutionary ladder, moving away from organization and mass participation toward individuality and spontaneity. A backyard rink is for pick-up hockey games wherein fairness and justice are built-in by the players, not tacked on by striped-shirted authority. It's a safe place for a child to take those first shuffling and hesitant learn-to-skate strides (as a generation of family and neighborhood children have on our rink). It's a place for my solitary early morning skates and for our occasional Saturday night skating parties for family and friends where shinny with a frozen tennis ball is followed by a hot chocolate or a cold beer. We build our rink for the best reason of all. For the fun of it.