is not danced. A cold kingdom.
Conversely, the cold and winter has also been used in poetry as a punchline. In 1971, poet Alden Nowlan, may have been ahead of his time, in combining poetic prose with a Canadian climate jab. He created a poem suggesting that the winter of Canada had unparalleled danger, simply because it is a Canadian winter.
Innocently titled “Canadian January Night,” Nowlan’s poem reads:
This is a country
where a man can die
simply from being
Caught outside
Likewise, Roch Carrier’s famous hockey sweater story incorporates all facets of Canada’s winter culture, from both a French and English perspective and the horror of having to wear the uniform of one’s dreaded rival in an unsympathetic public place. Winter shrivels in its impact besides such humiliation.
First Peoples curling five, possibly at Washakada Indian School in Elkhorn, circa 1898.
Perhaps the relationship between Canadians and the winter is best understood by Canadians transplanted from their homeland. It is now common for Canadian entertainers to head to the United States exporting their talents to a larger audience, but intriguingly, it appears that many of these entertainers can’t help sharing stories about their Canadian upbringing in interviews. Comedians such as Howie Mandell and Mike Myers are notorious for going off topic in interviews with stories about their Canadian childhoods. Myers’s connection with Canada resulted in a movie project based entirely on his love of Canada’s national game. Myers’s film, The Love Guru, centred around the main character helping to turn around the career of a hockey player on his favourite team, the Toronto Maple Leafs. The movie was a critical and commercial bust, but it affirmed the idea that while Myers hasn’t lived in Canada for years, his upbringing certainly remains influential in his writing and producing.
It’s a sentiment that is echoed by Canadian writer Blanche Howard who remarked:
To tell you the truth, in California I missed the wildness of the Canadian winter. There is something stirring about a blizzard, something elemental about pitting oneself against driving, stinging snow in below zero temperatures. I often think it accounts for the general peacefulness of the Canadian character, all the aggressive energy has been used up in battling and surviving nature.
On the other hand, Jack Kent Cooke, owner of the expansion Los Angeles Kings, who entered the National Hockey League in the fall of 1967, was convinced that with 2 million ex pat Canadians in California he’d have no problem selling out his games. Full houses, however, proved hard to come by and a puzzled Cooke finally concluded that the 2 million Canucks had moved there because they hated hockey and by extension that memory of the wildness of the Canadian winter.
Humans are bound by their relationship with nature. Canadian culture stems from decades of long, harsh winters, from unrelenting snowfalls, and short summers. It’s simply a reaction to the country’s geographic location. It’s something that has evolved naturally.
While Canadians have adopted the story of theirs being a land of immigrants, the country still has a collective culture defining the nation as a whole, and that collective cultural identifier has been the harsh Canadian winter. It comes up in conversations wherever Canadians travel. It’s something synonymous with Canada, like the British and their tea, or the Spanish with salsa.
Despite the threat that winters will become balmier, for now Canadians still have a collective culture binding them together — a common bond of fighting the frigid winter, of making use of the cold elements, and embracing them, and ultimately of becoming identified with them.
THREE Winter Sports in Canada from Snowshoeing to Cross-Country Skiing
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