CLEVELAND, Ohio — Some Clevelanders hate winter. Once Christmas is over and the new year dawns, they grit their teeth and gripe about the cold and snow until March – or beyond.

But why not embrace what feels like a real January, where snow has transformed the tired brown landscape to a whimsical world of white?

Winter can feel magical, if you take it seriously — unlike my middle schoolers, whom I have to nag to wear a coat to school.

You can’t love winter if your only interaction takes place in frigorific parking lots, dashing between your car and your destination, without boots, gloves or tuque (a Canadian word for winter hat I wish we would all adopt).

Yes, it’s cold. Yes, I prefer 75 degrees and sunshine.

But we are Clevelanders. Like the classic graphic tee, which I own in pink: “You gotta be tough.”

And you gotta deal with a 10-day streak of temperatures that didn’t break 32 degrees, whether you like it or not. The good news is our daily allotment of snow stayed on the ground.

Unlike cold rain, you can play in the snow. You can ski or snowboard, snowshoe or cross-country ski. You can sled or make snow angels, and if its warm enough make snowpeople or have a snowball fight. Snow days are the most beloved of all school holidays because of their inherent surprise.

If you get a bluebird day with snow, even better. The sunshine bouncing off the ground can lift your spirit in bounds.

And even if you don’t, extra daylight increases serotonin levels in your brain, helping you regulate mood, sleep and appetite.

Go ice skating at an outdoor rink, like in downtown Akron or Cleveland, or in a flooded pocket park in Shaker Heights.

Hike through the woods in the Metroparks, or a just take walk around the block in the dark. (And while you’re out there, why not be a good neighbor and shovel the sidewalk. if you’re able?)

The snow softens everything; the quiet it creates feels like meditation.

When you return home, stomp your boots, shake off the flakes and get cozy under a blanket on your couch. If you have a fireplace, take advantage. Make hot chocolate or tea and curl up with a good book. This is gezellig, a Dutch word that captures a cozy feeling of warmth, light and comfort, shared with loved ones.

I made my 11-year-old daughter sled with me a few weekends ago. Because it’s weird if a grown-up sledded by themselves. But I will ski solo any time, doing laps of moguls on North Bowl at Boston Mills.

I’ve been skiing with my family at the Boston Township enclave (“resort” is way too fancy a word for the cluster of runs) since I joined ski club in third grade. I took my kids when they were still bundled in sleepers in their car seat carrier, plunking them on a table for my dad to watch while my mom and I skied. When they were 2, my mom started teaching them.

It’s an investment to teach your kids to ski. You spend years on the bunny hill, calming tantrums and yelling “Turn! Turn!” and occasionally bribing with hot pretzels, while wishing you were swishing down black diamonds. But like so much of the hard work of parenting, the effort is so, so worth it.

Sharing my hobby with my kids means I get to keep doing it. Because now on winter weekends, we meet up with my mom and my sister’s family for fresh air and daylight and exercise. It’s a sport I hope will improve their winters for the rest of their lives.

This year, we skiers have lucked out with snow, both natural and manmade. While last year, it was Jan. 17 before Boston Mills opened any of its advanced terrain, this year North Bowl was open before Christmas. And we’ve had real powder to play on.

With climate change, we’re seeing warmer winters and less snow. A 2023 study by the National Ski Areas Association predicts that if climate change is left unchecked, ski resorts in several states, including Ohio, could lose between 61% to 81% of their operational days by mid-century. A group called Save Our Snow (helpfully nicknamed SOS) compiles information on what the ski industry is doing to combat climate change.

Across the globe, 2024 was the hottest year ever, beating the record set the year before and breaching the international goal set in 2021 that aimed to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) since pre-industrial times.

That may be good news to Clevelanders who don’t want to don a parka to walk their dog. But how cute are dogs in the snow, whether they’re romping like my golden retriever or wearing a coat and booties?

With our 64 inches annually, we don’t even rank in the top 10 cities for average seasonal snow totals. We’re bested by:

Syracuse, New York, 128 inches a year

Erie, Pennsylvania, 104 inches

Rochester, New York, 102 inches

Buffalo, New York, 96 inches

Boulder, Colorado, 93 inches

Duluth, Minnesota, 90 inches

Flagstaff, Arizona, 90 inches

Anchorage, Alaska, 78 inches

Grand Rapids, Michigan, 78 inches

Worcester, Massachusetts, 73 inches

Now that Lake Erie has begun to freeze, we’ll have less lake effect snow.

But the next time we get a pile of it, pull on your snowpants, go out and play. Because loathing winter won’t make it pass any quicker.

Cleveland.com content director Laura Johnston writes weekly about life in her 40s in the column, Our Best Life. Subscribe to the newsletter to get the column delivered to your inbox Friday mornings. Find her on Instagram @ourbestlifecle.

Associated Press

MADISON, Wis. (AP) — Jaloni Cambridge scored 27 points and Chance Gray added 22 to help No. 9 Ohio State beat Wisconsin 80-69 on Thursday night.

Cambridge, who entered averaging 14.5 points, shot 11 of 16 from the field and added a career-high eight rebounds.

Cotie McMahon added 17 points for the Buckeyes (17-0, 6-0 Big Ten), who are off to their best start since winning their first 19 games in 2022-23.

Serah Williams had 20 points and 17 rebounds and Tess Myers scored a season-high 18 points for Wisconsin (10-8, 1-6), which has lost six straight. The Badgers’ only league victory came against Rutgers on Dec. 8.

Wisconsin held a 37-34 rebounding advantage and made 12 of 29 3-pointers.

Takeaways

Ohio State: Gray made 5 of 9 3-point attempts as the Buckeyes had little trouble scoring inside or outside.

Wisconsin: Reserve Lily Krahn added 16 points and made four 3-pointers for the Badgers, but Williams needs more help. Williams’ double-double was her seventh this season.

Key moment

Myers’ 3-pointer got Wisconsin within 54-51 with 2:12 left in the third quarter, but Ohio State pulled ahead 63-54 by the end of the period. Gray made three free throws with less than a second left.

Key stat

The Buckeyes entered with an average of 11.5 steals per game and finished with 11, including three by McMahon.

Up next

Ohio State plays at Penn State on Sunday. Wisconsin travels to Nebraska on Monday.

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President-elect Donald Trump’s success despite constantly saying the quiet part out loud seems to have spread among other Republicans.

The most recent example is Ohio GOP Chair Alex Triantafilou, who made an appalling admission last week when he claimed the GOP’s “strategy” of “confusing Ohioans” had succeeded in thwarting an anti-gerrymandering ballot initiative that would have created an independent, citizen-led commission to draw the state’s electoral maps.

Triantafilou’s statement during a meeting with Republicans in Fremont was the kind of thing you’re not supposed to admit, at least in public. But it was hardly surprising to supporters of the ballot measure, who complained after Republican officials wrote a summary to be placed on ballots that indicated a “yes” vote would enable — not stop — gerrymandering. A number of voters said the confusing language tricked them into voting against a measure they supported.

That didn’t bother Triantafilou.

“A lot of people were saying, ‘We’re confused! We’re confused by Issue 1.’ Did you all hear that? Confusion means we don’t know, so we did our job,” Triantafilou said, according to the Fremont News Messenger. “Confusing Ohioans was not such a bad strategy.”

Ohio Democratic Party Chair Liz Walters responded in a statement, saying she’d never heard such a brag and that it’s “the oldest trick in the book to not tell voters the truth to get what you want.”

Triantafilou did not respond to a request for comment.

The failure of Issue One left Republicans in control of the redistricting process, which they have used to gerrymander the state’s districts in ways that benefit Republicans and disadvantage Black voters. It’s reminiscent of the old tricks used during the Jim Crow era to maintain power, as elections officials would do things like ask impossible questions as part of a “literacy test” of Black voters.

Triantafilou and other Republicans didn’t go that far, but their dubious “strategy” of confusing voters will nonetheless fortify a system that serves the GOP and white conservatives in particular.

This is the kind of trickery we can expect from Republicans in the months and years ahead as they look to shore up their power. In recent years, the convictions of far-right activists Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman for attempting to confuse voters about their voting rights, and of activist Douglass Mackey for his plot to misinform voters about how they could cast their votes, have revealed a certain desperation among some conservatives to gain a political advantage through any means at their disposal.

It’s almost like some of these Republicans don’t believe they could win a fair fight.