Since moving to Utah from Southern California ten years ago, I have learned a lot about how landscaping and climate differences affect the way different cultures celebrate and enjoy Christmas. In Utah, Christmas is just more…hard core.

A few years ago, I learned that a Christmas tree is better if you drove up a snowy mountain for an hour, then hiked for an hour in thigh deep snow (and used a VERY public bathroom on that hike) and chopped it down, debugged it, and dragged it back to the truck yourself.

I have also learned that you can drive a mile up a canyon road to see a herd of Santa’s reindeer…which may actually happen in Southern California too but we define “canyon” a little differently.

This year, Elsa and I experienced (I witnessed, she experienced) a new Christmas time activity. Actually, this was a rather new concept all together, Christmas or not, and from what I understand, this can be done in a lake in the summer time too. I don’t know if it’s a Utah thing, a Delta Utah thing, or a Ryan’s family thing, but the general idea is that you take a sturdy inner tube, put people in it, then pull it over whatever terrain you can with what ever high powered machinery you have at your disposal.

The instructions seem to go like this:

1. Go outside while there is like six inches of that white, cold, icky stuff all over the ground. You know the stuff, it falls out of the sky in this gosh derned state.

I think it helps if the air is moving, unblocked by buildings or trees, and is so cold that it feels like you are being stabbed in the face with a dagger when it hits you. Be sure you are unbearably cold.

2. Bring out as many of the children from inside the house as you can catch. Wrap them up in every bit of material you have around the house for wrapping children up in—this will make them fuss less when you are out there, and also it give them less arm mobility so that they cannot so fight you as you perform step three.

3. Wedge all of the children tightly together in a sturdy inner tube; big ones go in back, little ones go in the front. Instruct the big ones to hang on to the little ones.

4. Tie one end of a rope to the back of a motor powered vehicle.

5. Tie the other end of the same rope to the inner tube full of children.

6. Drive.

Speed up as you hit bumps in the path, this will make the inner tube full of children scream louder.



Be aware that the driver is given extra points per head he can smack into hanging objects along the path.




7. When a child cries, “I don’t want to try that again” (this will probably not occur until after several rotations) remove the children from inner tube being careful not to pull them out of their boots (if a boot is inadvertently removed, you will be required to carry the child into the house yourself).

8. Give all of the children hot chocolate to thaw them out before they start begging to do that again.

Important Note: When you talk to the children, call this activity “sledding.”

Yeah, I know, I know, I know...even we naïve Californians know sledding is done on long boards with little tracks at the bottom and involves a natural slide down a hill and not an all terrain vehicle. Still, if your child is asked about their vacation, wouldn’t it be better if they said, “I went sledding” instead of “oh well Poppa tied us to a four wheeler, and then…”

There is an adult version of the activity, which I did not film because it’s performed in an open field where it is even COLDER. It’s about the same as described above, but with fewer people on the tube, and instead of trying to make them scream, the driver is trying to kill them.

Come to think of it, with my own family’s love of dirt bikes, ATVs, and risking life and limb for amusement, I am not entirely sure why we never thought of any variation of this ourselves. It couldn’t have been a safety concern, I mean they let us play in constructions sites and scorpion/rattlesnake enriched fields for Pete's sake.

Gee, Uncle Corky, you really let us down!