Commentary
Winters in Old Canada were, for most people, one long playtime. The fields, rivers, and the ports of Montreal and Quebec being frozen and blanketed in snow, the natural course of the seasons forced many to take months off work.
“Winter in Canada is the season of general amusement,” wrote Anglo-Irish writer Isaac Weld after touring the country in 1795. “The clear frosty weather no sooner commences, than all thoughts about business are laid aside, and every one devotes himself to pleasure. … At Montreal, in particular it appears then as if the town were inhabited but by one large family.”
A solid layer of snow made the roads, pitted and potholed for much of the year, smooth, hard, and dry in cold weather. Transportation by land was thus far more comfortable, as the great chronicler of old Montreal, Edgar Collard, wrote in one of his collections. An Anglo-Montrealer observed in 1833 that thanks to “the severity of the cold … the worst roads are converted into the best … Indeed a mild winter is regarded as a great calamity by the Canadians.”…