Schoolchildren enjoyed a rare snow day on Monday, as the area received from five to eight inches of fluffy white snow in some of the largest flakes I have seen in some time.

The snow was so fluffy and light, ideal for causing white-outs and all sorts of problems for adults. For the children that got to stay home, the cold weather and the dry and fluffy snow weren't very conducive to being outdoors for very long.

Winter recreation and activities planned on snow days have changed a great deal since I was a child. Snow days involved staying outdoors as long as you could stand it, mainly because there was little to door indoors but drive our mothers crazy.

Playing outdoors involved sledding, making snow forts and conducting clandestine search and destroy missions on snow structures made by other neighborhood kids.

Sledding was great fun and good exercise. There was a street in the town where I grew up that was very steep for a block and levelled out, perfect for sledding. In the interest of safety (and probably at the insistence of mothers in the community) the city would block off these two blocks and surrender them to the kids in town.

It was quite a blast, racing downhill head first on a wooden and steel sled, learning (sometimes the hard way) the best way to control the direction of the sled and the fine art of waxing your runners to maximize your speed.

I inherited some pretty beat up wooden sleds from my four older siblings, and the flat plastic sled and round toboggan were just being used by the rich kids. If you thought controlling a wooden sled was tough, forget about even trying with a toboggan. There's nothing quite like careening down a hill with no control, spinning in circles as you descend to your demise.

The truly hard core sledding junkies would devise ways to enhance their experience, packing down a path by using water, brought out in their mother's roasting pans, to make some really slick and hard patches of ice. Others would pile as many people as they could on their sleds and use Newton's laws of motion to do the rest.

Making snow forts required patience, good snow cover and the right consistency of snow to make a good fort. In my experiences, we usually went with the classic horseshoe shaped configuration. They took longer to build but were easier to defend than a straight wall. Again, mom's roasting pan, filled with water, became an effective way to reinforce the structure.

Destroying another fort was usually done at night and involved using your legs to kick down the structure. This would prove especially painful if the builder had thought ahead and reinforced the structure with ice.

One of the more pleasant things we would often do after a snowstorm was make snow ice cream. This involved gathering fresh snow from a safe, unspoiled area, adding milk, vanilla and sugar, mixing, mixing and mixing until it reached the right consistency. It was a treat that we enjoyed innocently, and still can be enjoyed today. It's best to be very picky about where you get the snow and not to think too much about the role precipitation plays in purifying the air we breathe.

As is the case with many things from childhood, dealing with snowstorms as adults isn't nearly as much fun. I remember playing in the snow all day and never bothering to scoop the sidewalk and my father out in the cold and dark scooping after working all day.

Now that it's my turn, I can understand my father a whole lot better. Youth is wasted on the young, they say. Enjoy your snow days while you can, because you will be scooping soon enough.

As always, I welcome your comments. You can reach me by email at tstangl@lemarscomm.net, telephone 712-546-7031, x40 or toll free 1-800-728-0066 x40.

Thanks for reading, I'll keep in touch. Feel free to do the same.