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Why is street hockey called “shinny”?

Although shins take a beating during a game of shinny, the name comes from the Celtic game of shinty. A pick-up game of hockey, either on the street or on ice, shinny has no formal rules, and the goals are marked by whatever is handy. The puck can be anything from a ball to a tin can. There’s no hoisting, bodychecking, or lifting the puck because no one wears pads. Shinny is a uniquely Canadian expression.

The first professional shin pads were hand-stitched leather-covered strips of bamboo, wrapped around the lower leg outside knee-high stockings.

For many Canadian kids during the 1930s and 1940s, copies of the Eaton’s catalogue shoved into their socks were their first shin pads.

Who made the first hockey sticks?

The First Nations connection to the very first hockey sticks got a boost in early 2008 when the son of a Quebec City antique dealer acquired what he claims is a 350-year-old curved Mi’kmaq stick that he says proves Natives played hockey in Canada as early as the late seventeenth century. The man’s assertion hasn’t been met with much support among experts, but one thing is certain: the Mi’kmaq of Nova Scotia were carving single-piece hockey sticks at least as early as the 1870s and probably earlier. They utilized a wood known as hornbeam (also called ironwood) because of its strength. Later they turned to yellow birch when they exhausted the available hornbeam. These early sticks curved up like field hockey sticks and were much shorter and heavier than the kind used in modern ice hockey. The Starr Manufacturing Company in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, started producing hockey sticks in the late nineteenth century under the brand names Mic-Mac and Rex. The company’s sticks were immensely popular well into the 1930s. Starr was also famous for its skates, which it began manufacturing in the 1860s.