Childhood winter activities in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, weren't just participating in recreation—they had you training for a silent, frozen apocalypse. Our winter fun was a wild, unsupervised mix of ingenuity, high-speed peril, and absolutely zero protective gear. Forget expensive resort activities; our childhood demanded adrenaline earned through near-misses and creative misuse of household objects. Let's dive deeper into the frosty, fractured memories of the winter activities that would summon a fleet of emergency services today.

When some of us were kids, the era of specialized plastic sleds hadn't fully dawned. We had to get resourceful. The garbage can lid was the default. It guaranteed you’d be spinning wildly by the time you reached maximum velocity, trading steering for pure disorientation. A two-kid ride involved one kneeling and one standing precariously on the edges, ensuring a spectacular, high-G-force ejection upon hitting the first bump. When lacking a lid, we turned to cardboard boxes, inner tubes, and really anything else we could think of to keep the fun going.  

Or, for those of us 80s/90s kids, we had utilized sno-tubes which got up to ridiculous speeds. These inflated, neon-colored death-donuts still offered absolutely zero steering or braking, leaving you at the mercy of gravity as you prayed to avoid the bone-jarring collision with a tree or fence at Mach speed.

Bumper-hitching, skitching, or whatever you called hitching a ride by gripping the rear bumper or tow hitch of a slow-moving vehicle on an icy road was another winter pastime. Some people preferred to grab the bumper itself, in all its chrome glory, while others preferred trailer hitches for maximum grip power. Whatever your preferred technique, it always ends in losing your grip going over a bump or a turn and going flying in the wrong direction.

Another high-speed winter activity on the list was DIY ice slides. We didn’t wait for mother nature to make the perfect ice run; we forced her hand. The ritual of carrying lukewarm tap water out in buckets, slopping it down a packed snow ramp, and waiting for the deep freeze is forever ingrained in our minds. This process was repeated for hours, giving us all slightly waterlogged sneakers and a profound respect for the transformative power of the freezing point of H2O. If the yard was too flat, the side of the driveway or the sidewalk became the target. We’d coat the concrete in water until it became a death sheet—a perfect, clear, slick surface that turned a gentle slope into a high-speed launch ramp directly toward the street. The curb was usually the only breaks we had.

Ice skating is still a winter classic. Back then though, we didn’t even necessarily need a rink. The best dads spent an entire evening soaking his backyard lawn to create a makeshift rink. The rink was inevitably uneven, bumpy, and peppered with frozen tufts of grass. The real fun was when the mild weather returned, turning the edges into a slippery, muddy moat. Another option, for lack of pond or official rinks, may have been the local retention pond or drainage ditch. While today a flashing sign and a loud siren would warn of thin ice, we had The Stick Test. A kid with a long branch would tap the surface. If it didn't immediately shatter, the consensus was "Good enough!" We'd lace up our hand-me-down skates (which were always two sizes too big) and venture out, relying entirely on the collective weight distribution to prevent a tragic mishap.

Another lasting tradition is the snow fort. The key to a strong snow fort was a layer of ice. After construction, we would pour water over the walls to create an icy exterior. This made the fort incredibly strong but also transformed the interior into a miniature freezer. Spending hours inside the dark, damp, ice-walled enclosure was mandatory, leading to mild hypothermia and the proud, chattering declaration that this was the best fort ever. Advanced builders used aluminum bread pans to mold perfect, icy "bricks" that were then stacked and mortared with snow and water. These forts were impenetrable from the outside but posed a genuine danger to the occupants; if a wall collapsed, you were trapped under a dense pile of frozen, heavy blocks. Today’s kids get called in long before any hypothermia or frostbite kicks in though, ruining some of the fun. If they even make it outside to play in the snow in the first place.

Lastly, there was also that traditional game of King of the Hill. We didn’t need a playground when the plow left behind those massive, soot-stained mountains of packed ice and crusty snow right on the street corner. The rules were easy: reach the summit and stay there by any means necessary. It was a chaotic flurry of puffy nylon jackets and soaked mittens as you fought to maintain your footing while simultaneously trying to physically heave your friends back down into the gutter. There was a raw, adrenaline-fueled glory in being the one standing at the peak, looking down at the pile of tangled limbs below, knowing that in thirty seconds, you’d likely be the one flying through the air onto a crusty sidewalk.

Back in the day, we were little human pinballs, ricocheting off the side of minivans, tumbling off icy mounds, and emerging from the snowdrift smelling like a wet dog and grinning like a maniac. We were allowed the freedom—and the risk—to turn a simple snow day into an extreme sport.

And while today's kids are safer, strapped into their high-tech gear, they will never know the exhilarating, slightly terrifying joy of successfully completing a tow-hitch ride without losing a mitten. Now, that is nostalgia you can feel in your permanently tweaked spine.