The Winter Carnival has been inspiring
 writers for more than 100 years.

Mary Ann Grossmann/Saint Paul Pioneer Press

For those who want a book that puts the Winter Carnival in the wider context of the development of winter sports and how we handle the cold, Paul Clifford Larson's Minnesota Book Award-winning Icy Pleasures is a must.

Larson traces the carnival's beginnings to a New York reporter's likening of St. Paul to ``another Siberia, unfit for human habitation in winter.''

What better way to draw people to this growing, bustling city than by turning cold into a virtue? And so the first Winter Carnival in 1886 celebrated and helped popularize such ignored events as skiing, ice skating, curling and tobogganing.

Much of Larson's wide-ranging research material is at the Minnesota Historical Society, where the Winter Carnival collection includes magazines, special sections published by newspapers and souvenir programs.

Past Winter Carnivals come to life in these brittle pages, with their accounts of curling clubs and toboggan slides, uniformed marching clubs and sleigh rides, as well as the wonders of the ice palaces.

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