I love "Frosty the Snowman." My family and I like to go on a sleigh ride with a two-horse sleigh in Aspen, so we all scream different songs at the top of our lungs. I hope it doesn't scare the horses.
Jingle bells, jingle bells, Jingle all the way, Oh what fun it is to ride, In a one-horse open sleigh, hey, Jingle bells, jingle bells, Jingle all the way, Oh what fun it is to ride, In a one-horse open sleigh...
I grew up in the prolonged survival of the great age of the horse, with harness and saddle and sleigh bells and horse pictures, not as antiques but the facts of our lives.
Frosty the snowman was a jolly happy soul. With a corncob pipe and a button nose and two eyes made out of coal. Frosty the snowman is a fairy tale they say. He was made of snow but the children know how he came to life one day.
Over the river and through the wood,
To grandfather's house we go;
The horse knows the way
To carry the sleigh,
Through the white and drifted snow.
We have a small, tight family. I left home at a young age and the best thing for me was to go home at Christmas-time and spend time with my family and friends. It's kind of funny, most people do turkey and all the trimmings, but we would have a big seafood festival because it's the only time of the year that we'd eat it. We never really went caroling, but once in a while we'd got out for a sleigh ride
I realized horses have personality when I bought one and I had one, who's now out to pasture, a horse named Drifter. Before that, I was a city boy. Horses, I used to go out to the LaBagh Woods and ride at a stable once every two years or something; no idea about horses. Dogs, I knew, had personalities, but not horses.
I used to ride horses and I remember one day I was working with a horse and we were having it jump, you know? There was a competition and so we were doing a test run and the horse fell on top of my body. I was a kid, like 7 years old. It took them a long time to take the horse off of my body after it had fallen.
As a kid, I used to love going to the cabane a sucre in Montreal to go sugaring off with our school. Sleigh rides, hot maple syrup, pour that syrup on snow and you got yourself some taffy. Need I say more?
I love hip-hop; I love Sleigh Bells. I also love classical music and musical theater.
A lot of times I wind up playing songs like (Alice in Chains') "Down in a Hole" that make me scream at the top of my lungs if I want to get frustration out from a bad day.
As dry leaves that before the wild hurricane fly, when they meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky. So up to the house-top the coursers they flew, with the sleigh full of toys, and St. Nicholas too.
I have to say my relationship with the horses is the biggest thing, and it grows. I love horses more and more every day, and I'm breeding, so when I'm playing a horse that's the son of a horse, the daughter of a horse I used to play, it's like bonding. So I think that's the most amazing part of it. It's the passion that we polo players have for the horses first, and then the game and the strategy of the game and winning and the team and your teammates, all of those things are a big part of it, but the horses are my favorite part.
It always amazes me when people go rent horses and ride them. You mean you want me to pay you to ride a horse?
I like horses. My grandfather had a horse named Whiskey and I got to ride it all the time. They are terrifying and beautiful. If there's a beast taking you to heaven or hell it probably looks something like a horse.
That's the real excellent scary part, that feeling, and that feeling won't come if the lady from next door is there and your mom won't ride the ride, because what brings on that feeling most is when your mom rides wedged in tight with you and your brother on nights like this, when your mom will scream the excellent scream, the scream that people you see in snatches on the boardwalk stop and stare for, the scream that stops the ride next door, the scream that tells us to our hearts the bolts have finally broken.
When we pulled out into the winter night and the real snow, our snow, began to stretch out beside us and twinkle against the windows, and the dim lights of small Wisconsin stations moved by, a sharp wild brace came suddenly into the air. That's my middle-west - not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns, but the thrilling returning trains of my youth and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow.