As a child, I grew up in the nineties. I didn’t catch much of the earliest years, but some of my earliest vivid memories are from the times of the Lion King and Eurohouse. Another thing I have fond memories of from those days is the cold. Our house was built on the dike next to a big river: the Amstel. In a village some place before it reaches the well known Amsterdam. Winters there were cold, and if we were lucky the entire thing froze, allowing us to tread the rivers on our ice skates. I think this is the reason why that American announcer thought we skate to school and work, but trust me: it’s only ever done as recreation.

I think it happened like, four or five years in total. And the rest of the decade also was very generous when it came to Snow. Every single winter, we had the periods of at least 5cm snowfall, and usually there was more. I was a kid so obviously I didn’t have that big of a grasp of time, and how long these cold periods lasted, but I do remember lots of snow.

The next decade, things started to change. The first few years still brought us the white winters, but gradually things started to change. There were fewer and fewer cold days, and especially the days where heaps of snow fell at once got rarer and rarer, and the ice packs got thinner and thinner. The days of the frozen rivers were over: only the bodies of water that didn’t flow ended up freezing over (though it’s the Netherlands; we have a ton of those). It was a big sign that global warming was having its impact, or at the very least that something was going on, because this change was way too drastic to just happen naturally.

Now then this decade this trend has continued. The days of real cold and ice are long gone. A few outliers ignored, each winter only has perhaps a few days where it’s snowing enough to be visible, let alone for the layer of snow to have any depth. The big tradition of ice skating is still going on, but most people have moved to indoor ice skate halls. We’ve had many years without any of the nature ice being thick enough to stand on.

This winter though has been exceptional. First of all it started off in December with a huge amount of snow, a thicker layer hadn’t fallen in ten years. Then January and February continued on with many more frozen days than what we usually get. And when we just thought that spring was around the corner, this Huge Wave of cold air came from Siberia to deliver the coldest period of the winter so far. It’s still going on and we’re in the middle of this wave, with temperatures being -8C outside. That may not seem much, but to us it is!

Especially the past days things have gotten cold enough to skate for the first time in five years. Everybody’s gone crazy, the papers are all over it, the first marathons have already been run and everybody is scrambling to get some of the icy experience before it’s gone.  It’s expected to last until upcoming Saturday. There’s a huge wave of nostalgia going across the country for an experience getting rarer and rarer. And even though I don’t skate, the nostalgia has been hitting myself as well. Sometimes it can be the very simple things.

I went around and took a number of pictures to etch this in my brains.