There are some years we get off lightly with snow. If we have it one day, it can be almost gone the next. What a difference from my memory of the past of it. Snow meant building snowmen, throwing snowballs and making slides. Slides were lengths of well-polished snow and the more you slid on them, the more the compacted snow had turned to ice until it was a very fast run. A bit like skiing without skis. The school playground was covered in slides of various lengths, depending on how hesitant or brave you were.
Usually by the time we got into classroom, we tried to get mittens, scarves and hats on the radiators. Hands were very painful with the cold and worse when they started to heat up. That didn’t matter in the least because as soon as the pain was gone, we were ready to go back out. It was easier at home though, there would have been some dry clothes to change into and the wet ones put in front of the fire to dry.
My early recollection of heavy snow was opening the back door and being faced with a wall of snow three to four feet deep. My mother was there with the shovel, shifting the snow to make a path outside and even then she would find time to show me how to build a snowman. Over the years the weather seems to have changed quite a bit and there has been less snow or it doesn’t lie for any length of time so today’s children miss out on a lot of fun. It was ‘children playing’ kind of fun, nothing organised for them. We weren’t allowed to throw stones but you could throw snowballs and that seemed to satisfy the rebellion in you without doing any damage other than to leave your hands cold and wet.
It was not a time to rebel at school, it was still the time of the ‘tawse’, the thick leather strap wielded by teachers to the hands of any errant child and if your icy, painful hands were the recipients of the tawse, the stinging result was sure to bring on floods of tears. 
We live in a valley so on the rare occasions it does snow, there are plenty of favourite places to go with your sledge. You don’t need a steep hill, sledges are often plastic now and light so can travel fast without having to haul a heavy sledge back up the hill. You seldom see a child looking unhappy when playing in the snow. You just need to Google a few images to see the reaction is the same in every country.
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