As the winter and Christmas season begins, snow days become a common conversation at Malvern.

Everyone loves snuggling up with a good blanket and some hot cocoa to enjoy your free days off of school because of Mother Nature, but does aging affect our snow day fun?

After doing extensive research over the past 16 years I’ve been on this planet, I think I’ve got a firm grasp of what snow days become as we get older. Nobody wants to admit it, but as we get older snow days do more harm than they do good.

When you’re just a little friar, you spend the maximum amount of time sledding on the huge hills down the street from your house. You run outside in the nine inches of snow up to your knees and begin to build one of your trusty snowmen. Only good times can be seen at this stage.

Well as soon as you become an able-bodied child, your parents waste no time putting you to work with the snow shovel. You may be young, but you’re in for a world of hurt after countless years of shoveling the driveway. Nobody likes doing it and you try to argue with your parents that you don’t even drive yet, so why do you need the driveway cleared anyways, am I right?

I think our parents use snow days as an excuse to get us to do more work for them. They confuse snow days for more work days instead of more fun days. Snow days are meant to be a way to get away from our homework, not to come home and be smacked in the face with a shovel.

I also am a strong believer that teachers make this mistake too by assigning either: a) more work in preparation of a snow day or b) more work on the day we get back to makeup for the snow day.

We get that we may be getting behind on work, but that is perfectly fine in my opinion. It just means we get to watch you guys struggle trying to get us caught up minus the extra work. When our teachers get really disorganized, it gives us at least a 30% chance that they’ll forget to give us a quiz or ask for homework on the given date.

Sounds like a pretty good statistic to me if I say so myself. I think just about every student would prefer to be behind on work than get double the work. Procrastination is a students best friend.

I only have a few pieces of advice to try and combat these actions taken by our superiors so use them sparingly.

The first piece of advice is to try and convince your teachers that you won’t have a snow day. Using this technique, they will believe they have another day to do work when in reality they will be left hopeless while you are home shredding hills.

My second tactic is to try and milk some cash from your parents. If you’re good at something, never do it for free. They want you to shovel the driveway? Not without a cash settlement.

Ask for small sums first to help build the initial trust that you can do a good job. Then ask for a raise when you throw in the “I’ll scrape the ice off the cars too” tactic.

These techniques have served me well in the past and I hope they do the same for yourself and I this coming snow season.