Читать книгу Let It Snow. Keeping Canada's Winter Sports Alive онлайн

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Winter plays a major role in the Canadian story, not only in how it has shaped our sports history, but, more directly, our experience of everyday life. Nor is climate change only to blame for changes in its role. Increasing urbanization and higher expectations of comfort have also played their part in lessening winter’s place in our lives.

What did our great grandparents and their predecessors think of winter’s distinct conditions? No doubt they griped, but evidence seems to suggest they also welcomed its peculiar opportunities.

Fred Grant’s memories from this era, preserved in the Simcoe County Archives outside Barrie, Ontario, provide some clues. Writing in the early 1920s, many years after he had left for the Pacific Coast to play professional lacrosse in Victoria in early 1892, he recalled the winter sports and recreation of his youth in Barrie and its surroundings in the 1870s and 1880s. He also had many things to say about how games like hockey have morphed into something different in the twentieth century.