Canada is a winter nation. Some of us are the sons and daughters of lumberjacks and pioneers and some of us were taught to skate before we can walk. “We The North,” as our only professional basketball team has so aptly put it.
If you listened to our own hype, you would think we Canadians were superhuman—capable of withstanding impossible temperatures and surviving for long periods of time without sun or fresh air.
We all have our war stories, too. “I spent a winter in Regina that was their coldest in 100 years,” one might say.
“Well, I was at a cabin in Timmins one February when the heater broke, the pipes burst and we ran out of blankets,” another might reply.
I don’t think there is anything that makes a Canadian more proud than to look into an American’s shivering eyes and say, “You think this is cold? You wouldn’t last a minute where I’m from.”
But we aren’t really that tough, are we?
Across the country Canadians are cursing the gods while they scrape their windshields and plan exotic vacations to anywhere that is the exact opposite of Canada.
But more than anything, Canadians are complaining. Complaining about the temperature, complaining about the snow, and complaining about how there is no end in sight.
Well, if complaints were degrees Celsius we would all be plenty warm by now.
Is there anything worse than waiting for a bus in the freezing cold and having the person next to you go on at length about how “it isn’t fair” or how they “just can’t take it anymore?” You would think winter didn’t happen once every calendar year. Yes winter sucks, yes it’s long and no, there is nothing we can do to change either of those facts.
I’m guilty of this as well—I hate the cold. Canadian winters aren’t easy and complaining about them is the right of all citizens, but we can’t act tough about the winter for eight months of the year and then be surprised when the inevitable happens.
For the uninitiated, it is rightfully shocking to see the mounds of snow and the arctic weather forecasts going on in perpetuity. But you only get to be uninitiated once.
Let’s not forget about the less fortunate among us, either—the vulnerable people for whom a bad winter can literally be a death sentence. When they say it’s cold it’s because they may have frostbite or worse, not because they chose to wear their fashionable wool gloves instead of their clunky, heavy duty ones.
Especially in this modern age with its goose jackets, heated car seats, and near limitless hot cocoa, winter is an inconvenience, not a cosmic injustice.
Maybe it would be easier to just embrace it? We have ski hills, ice fishing, and the world’s longest skating rink at our doorstep. Is it really so bad?
It’s like that analogy everyone uses with the boiled frog. You know, the one where you turn the heat up on a frog in a pot of water gradually and he will allow himself to be boiled without ever jumping out.
Well, all I’m saying is it’s better to be a boiled frog than a boiled shrimp (read wimp). We are all in this pot together—let’s not make it worse than it has to be.
