My Husband is Mad as a Hatter

Durango's Snowdown, our annual winter festival, made Outside Magazine's top four best winter carnivals in North America. ha! It's a lot of fun, but to be ranked up there with Le Carnaval de Quebec is pretty funny - and inaccurate, but we don't mind.

There are events throughout the week (135 of them this year) - mostly silliness like racing mountain bikes down snowy slopes, contests to see how many people you can stuff into an outhouse and Polar Beer Plunges. The girls and I even watched a SPAM carving contest. Classy stuff. There were two women in their 70s who were just giggling and having the best time cutting away their lump of unidentifiable meat, and whenever the sides of "Mesa Verde" fell down, the lady building it would eat a piece she no longer needed. I had to have a subtle chat with Acacia who was visibly gagging every time it happened. She didn't know SPAM was food.

My neighbor Petra and I started off our Snowdown at the Fashion Do's & Don'ts, a show in which "models" dress up in creative variations of the year's theme (or not) and act like a bunch of teenagers. Par for the Snowdown course.

For example, to the left here we have the Kartrashian Sisters, dressed in haute-couture garbage bags. Perfect. And timely as the latest drama here in town is talk of banning all plastic bags. Below left is one of many Mad Hatters in town; the theme was Fairy Tales this year.... And did I mention the audience was dressed up too? There's a reason Durango was voted the Worst Dressed Town in America. We wear it like a badge of honour.













Petra, Uwe, Ilona and Michel came over for a cocktail and tortilla soup before the Parade on Friday night which the kids loved, and after getting our butts kicked in the Snowdown Broomball Tournament on Saturday, Nick and I went to The Follies with Jen & Courtney Heinicke. Scoring tickets to that is a big deal because although they are cheap, they're hard to get. If your name doesn't get picked in the lottery a month in advance, you end up downtown at 6am one cold January morning, listening to the radio for clues and running around with a thousand other crazy people. It's fun actually, but this year I got lucky in the lottery, which is even better!

So...... we went to The Follies, a show of acts put on by locals for locals. It's rude, crude and socially unacceptable - thus the mad rush to get tickets. Nick and I went dressed as Red Riding Hood and the Mad Hatter (from Alice in Wonderland) and our dates were a Fairy and Pinocchio. Those of you who know my husband, know he normally doesn't dress up. But you probably also know he doesn't do things halfway, either... so he moved his eye over to look madder.

I guess if you're going to do something, might as well do it right, right?