Anya enjoyed the snow. It's still cold, getting up around 10°F today. Should be warmer tomorrow, when Daniel is part of a dance performance in a park.
People get so cooped up in winter, it's fun to have a festival outside. When the Thames froze over, which it did some forty times between William the Conqueror's time and the present, people erected Frost Fairs on the ice, with entertainments (including bonfires). Virginia Woolf's Orlando has an early scene set at the Frost Fair of 1607, which Seymour Chwast made this wonderful animation for:
The St Paul Winter Carnival, founded in 1885, and the Quebec Winter Carnival both feel a bit like this, but also draw specifically from the traditional feasting before Lent, culminating on Mardis Gras, or Carne vale (farewell to meat). Which in warmer climes looks much different:
We'll see how much of that spirit comes through tomorrow. The next Saturday is a Sled Art rally in Powderhorn Park, with the dance performed again.
Part of what this kind of thing does is emphasize what one can do indoors vs outdoors. Until recently, with the advent of covered stadiums, you could have a feast or a party indoors, but a parade, you had to hold that in the street, in appropriate weather. So to have a carnival, a fair of any kind, in the out of doors on the frozen ice, was like thumbing your nose at the regular order of things. It was a glorious upside-down idea.
The St Paul Winter Carnival isn't such a big deal in this way. It's fun, sure, but people go outside for fun all the time. There are skating rinks with warminghouses, ski areas with aprés ski and bonfires. We are so confident of our ease in an out-of-doors we can get out of when we need to, and of an indoors we know is safe, that it seems a little pointless. People don't freeze to death the same random way they still did in the 1880's.
Or do they?
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