Generational Tobogganing

A memory on Facebook today reminded me of  one of my favourite Christmas holiday activities, tobogganing!

As kids, we had a red metal toboggan that  we would pull to our neighbourhood park and slide down, what we thought back then was a monstrous hill.  Up and down we would go, over and over again, almost till dark.

Sometimes the toboggan would stick to the hill and we had to use our core strength to inch along to get any movement!

When I was a teenager, my friends and I would drive out to Elkwater and toboggan in a friend’s field between the cacti and barbed wire fences. It was so dang cold, our toes were numb and our cheeks burned, but we didn’t care!

After we would drive back to the city, go Christmas carolling and watch “The Sound of Music”.

As a parent, we had a wooden toboggan that we would pull the kids around on our acreage.  We would toboggan on Christmas Eve down our approach!  Not much of a slope, but the ice would take us quite far down the road!  One year as we were tobogganing, a bald eagle flew over us!  The first one I ever saw near our acreage.

One year we pulled the toboggan behind the quad!  What fun!

As a grandparent, it is a pleasure to go tobogganing with the grandchildren.  One year, when the California kids were home for the holidays, we took them to Elkwater.  That was the year Brooklyn said, “Canada sure is cold!” as soon as she walked in the door!  It was so dang cold again that we could only go down the hill a few times, then had to run inside the old tourist centre, have a cup of hot chocolate and then muster up the courage to to go out again!  The run was long and it took a lot of energy to walk back up the hill with all of our bulky winter gear and the pockets of snow that would collapse under our feet, slowing us down, but you do what you have to do to see those cute smiles on everyone’s faces and hear their screams of delight!

This little ornament is showing Brooklyn in her pink snowsuit flying through the air as our toboggan takes its own flight plan!  I am further back laying in the snow giggling!