The beauty of winter, Jim and Greg discover, can easily run away with the imagination
By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by Jim Frise, December 27, 1947.
“Come on!” protested Jimmie Frise. “Wake up!”
“I’ve et too much,” I groaned.
“Look!” cried Jimmie, shaking me. “It’s the holiday season. Listen to the kids outside. Look at that beautiful snow.”
“Relax,” I begged. “Let’s relax. Let everybody relax.”
“Listen to this,” insisted Jim. “It’s something we should never forget. If we live to be 60, and if we sleep eight hours a day, we have spent 20 years – 20 YEARS – of our lives unconscious!”
“Unconscious,” I murmured, sinking deeper into the after-luncheon easy chair.
“Doesn’t that horrify you?” demanded Jim hotly. “Twenty years – a third of your entire life – you have spent, wasted, thrown away, in sheer unconsciousness.”
I waked slowly. I slowly sat up. I fought back the lovely soft, drowsy waves of sleepiness that had me, even to my finger tips and toes, in their luscious embrace.
I pushed myself heavily out of the easy chair. I stood up and re-buttoned my vest. There is nothing dearer to me than a holiday afternoon snooze following a good fat lunch.
“What,” I inquired formally, “did you say?”
“I said,” repeated Jimmie distinctly, “that if you live to be 60, and if you sleep eight hours a day, you have spent 20 years of your life UNCONSCIOUS!”
I fixed my mind on that horrifying statement. The more I examined it, the more horrible it became. With a sudden jolt, as it were, I came wide awake. I walked with decision to the window and looked out at the street.
A gorgeous new fall of snow had mantled the whole familiar dismal scene in Arctic splendor. The vulgar frowning houses across the road were cheerily fantastic in blankets, hoods, veils of shimmering white. The sky above was icy blue. The sun cut strange golden patterns with mauve shadows.
“Jim,” I demanded, with Canadian tears in my eyes, “what do you suggest we do?”
“Well,” considered Jim over my shoulder, “look at those kids building show men. How about going out and romping with the kids?”
“What an absurd suggestion!” I snorted. “Romp with the kids! Jim! As Canadians, on a day like this, it is our holy duty to celebrate it in some fitting fashion.”
“Two minutes ago,” scoffed Jim, “you were all for sleeping.”
“Heaven forgive me,” I whispered, pushing the curtain aside and looking out again on the vision of loveliness that comes with winter’s first snowfall.
“We Canadians,” I enunciated, “ought to have long ago devised some ceremonial, some sort of spontaneous carnival to welcome winter on its first true arrival. I mean a day like this. Not those bleak and slushy early December days. But a day like this should, by common consent, be the occasion of a city-wide, a country-wide celebration for which we have all been waiting. We should have carnival costumes all ready, we should have family parties organized and standing by. And when the first true, glorious day of full winter dawns, work should be forgotten, routine cast aside, and the entire community should burst forth in a great national festival.”
“Yeah,” interrupted Jim. “The only trouble is, this snow we’ve got here is more than likely local; and out in the suburbs, it’s still mud.”
“Er…uh…” I submitted. “But it’s a beautiful idea, don’t you think?””
“I think,” stated Jim, “we ought to put our coats on and go out and romp with those kids. They’re trying to make a snow man. Let’s go and show them what a real snowman looks like. Eh?”
“Jim,” I responded, “I feel more like standing here at this window, in this warm room, looking out upon the glories of winter and thinking beautiful thoughts about it.”
“There!” agreed Jim. “There you are: the typical Canadian! Our glorious winter is something to be viewed with deep appreciation from the storm windows of a nice cosy room.”
“I assure you,” I said, “that if there were some sort of festival, some kind of public celebration today, nobody would be out there joining in it with more gusto than I. But merely to go out and flounder around in the snow, with a bunch of children…”
“You are getting old,” smiled Jim. “You forget that this is the holiday season. All those youngsters are enjoying their freedom. The holiday spirit should be shared by us elders. When I was a child, my parents romped with me, built snow men for me, hauled me on toboggans, took me to the hills where I could slide….”
“Kids are more independent today,” I pondered. “They prefer to make their own fun.”
“What an alibi!” scorned Jim. “And still you wonder at juvenile delinquency! Still you complain about the lack of discipline in children! The secret of it all is, we have brushed our children off. We shoo them away to school as soon as they get up in the morning. We give them the radio to play with, rather than be bothered listening to their little questions. We toss them a quarter to go to the movies, to be rid of them for an evening. I venture the opinion that we are the most selfish generation in all history. We don’t want to be bothered with our own children!”
“Those kids out there,” I remarked, pushing the, curtains aside to look, “aren’t our children.”
“No, but they’re happy, joyous little creatures,” pursued Jim, “and I can’t imagine any finer, pleasant, more seemly way for you and me to give thanks for such a beautiful winter afternoon than by going out there right now and taking a kindly, human interest in them. Build them a snow man. Show them how. Make ’em a snow man six feet high. With a funny nose. And old hat. With coal for eyes…”
“Where are their own parents?” I queried. “Why aren’t their own parents out romping with them?”
“Probably,” said Jim bitterly, “their own parents kicked them out of the house to be rid of them. Greg, don’t let us fret about other people. Let us face our own consciences. That’s the great need of this day and age: let us face our own consciences!”
I could feel the old drowsiness starting to sneak back over me. The snow had such a glare. It made me have to shut my eyes. The room was so warm. The big chair so empty, so soft…
“Come!” cried Jim, detecting the symptoms. “You want to celebrate the arrival of the true, the glorious Canadian winter! You want a festival, a carnival, welcome it! For half an hour, for just a few minutes to breathe that clear delicious air…”
He ran to the vestibule and came back with my overcoat and muffler and hat and piled them on me. He hastily flung on his own.
“Come on!” he exulted. “Some day we’ll be unconscious for keeps.”
And that did it. For after all, on a genuine winter day, you can’t help but feel how good life is, and how precious the blood pumping in your veins; how fleeting the days and the years.
We stood on the verandah, inhaling the spice of the cold. Spice is the word for it; because the air of a snow-washed afternoon has that same almost aromatic tang to it that ginger and cloves possess.
Yet it was not a sharp cold. It was, in fact, the perfect afternoon for making snow men. It had just the right temperature to make the snow packy in the hand and squeaky under foot.
“Let’s,” I suggested, “take a brisk walk.”
“Let’s,” corrected Jim, suddenly leaping down the steps, “make a snow man.”
Stooping down, with his gloves on, he rolled a good fat snowball about the size of a grapefruit. This he placed on top of the snow and started to roll it.
In a moment, he had a good big snowball the size of a pumpkin. In another jiffy, he was grunting with the effort of rolling ahead of him across the lawn a monster snowball as big as an apple barrel.
“Come on!” he cried, flushed and puffed. “Hey, kids!”
On both our side of the street and across the road, a variety of small children paused in their revelry to look.
“Hey! Come on, kids! Let’s make a snow man!” roused Jim, waving his arms.
Several of them, I observed, had the makings of snow men of various sizes already rolled up. Nothing very big.
“Come on,” wheedled Jim. “Roll yours over here, and we’ll combine on a snow man six feet high!”
“You roll yours over here!” retorted a little girl in a high clear voice.
And all the others bent to their own enterprises.
“Oh, very well!” cried Jim heartily.
So I came down off the steps and helped him roll our snowball down the slope and start it across the street.
But it was pretty heavy going, as the snowball grew in size with each revolution. In fact, when we got it half way across the pavement, it had grown so large that the two of us could barely move it.
The children had by now quit their individual efforts and came running from the different lawns to watch us. They stood on the far sidewalk in silence, a snowsuit jury.
“Yo-heave!” commanded Jim.
We laid our shoulders to the ball and got it another 10 feet.
“Where,” inquired the little girl with the high clear voice, “where are you going to put that dirty big thing?”
We stood back. It had picked up quite a bit of dirt off the road as it rolled.
“Roll it back,” ordered the little girl, “where it came from. We don’t want any dirty big thing like that over in front of our house.”
“Don’t you want a great big, six-foot snow man?” coaxed Jimmie breathlessly.
“We’re building a fort,” said the little girl. “We’re going to have a fight. To the death.”
“Oh,” said Jim.
“I’m Superman,” announced a little boy who needed his nose wiped.
“I’m building,” lisped another little girl, “the Yempire State Building.”
“Take it back,” interrupted the little boss girl with the clear voice. “Get it the heck out of here.”
She indicated our large snow sphere with her foot. Jim started to speak and changed his mind. We both bent to roll the ball, now waist-high. But it stuck and we couldn’t move it. Jim kicked a large chunk off it, to reduce it. I kicked another. The children went back to their enterprises. The segments of our big snowball we cast away in various directions so as not to obstruct the pavement.
Then, in silence, we returned back across the road to our own side. We walked slowly up the front walk and stood at the foot of the steps.
“How,” I began, clearing, my throat, “how about a nice brisk walk?”
“Maybe,” ventured Jim, “if we stayed here on our own lawn and built a real big dandy of a snow man, we could show them…”
We both heard a sudden deep rumbling sound.
But it was already too late.
A big snowslide had begun on Jim’s roof, right over our heads. It fell on us like a ton of bricks.
As we picked ourselves up and started knocking the snow from our heads and shoulders and hooking it from inside our collars with crooked fingers, we could hear the hilarious laughter of little children in the distance.
“Jim,” I puffed, as we stumbled up the steps and into the vestibule, “the thing to do on a beautiful winter day is look at it through the window.”
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