Sled-riding is the most fun anyone can have in the middle of winter — and it's free! The best sleds I've used with my children are those round plastic saucers that go shooting down the hill at 100 miles per hour. Back in the day, however, sleds consisted of several slats of wood nailed to two red runners with a rudimentary steering bar. As children, my siblings and I turned sled-riding into a bloody sport of fists-and-will on the most hellish cliffs in history.

This hill was the steepest, bumpiest, rugged piece of earth covered with sprouting trees, razor-sharp prickers, boulders the size of bulldozers, and, to add insult to injury, at the bottom of the hill was a barbed wire fence surrounding what you hoped was a "frozen" pond at the time. A day of sled-riding while getting slashed by all of these natural elements rendered us unrecognizable by our mother. In short, this was the sled-riding hill from hell, and we loved it with sick pleasure and with no regard for our humanly existence.

Now, at the time we had two sleds in the condition that could be called, "rusting, warped, pieces of crap held together with hope and spit" that would terrify the hell out of any adult. At first we behaved as normal kids did and took turns riding slowly in a safe path past the obstacles at a cautious speed. Eventually, though, boredom and creativity got the best of us and knocked about eight lives off us that winter. It was the year that Howard Cosell and "Crash-up Derbies" were in favor with our clan. My older brother did a great impression of Howard's blood-pumping, on-the-edge-of-your-seat, play-by-bloody-play kind of voice, accelerated to insane childish decibels. "Crash-up Derbies" were a popular pastime of stock cars smashing the hell out of each other on television. We combined both elements and put it into experimental practice in the form of sled-riding — which we no longer referred to as "sled-riding." Sled-riding was for well-behaved, sane children. On a winter's morning we would just yell, "Hey! Let's go play Crash-up Derbies, guys!" I can imagine what my mother thought.

We divided up into teams of two kids each on two sleds. The point of the sport would be to beat the living daylights out of the rival passengers on their sled while hurtling down this God-forsaken hill at 100 miles per hour, crashing sleds all the way down. My parents probably wondered why the shiny Red Rider Specials we got at Christmas looked like tree bark with tin foil brackets by January. The siblings that were steering had the objective to smash into the other team's sled and try to send them off course into the woods. The objective of the back passengers was to knock the crap out of the other team's back passenger, jump over to their sled, knock the driver off, and gain possession of the rival sled. Remember the barbed wire fence? If by some slim chance we actually made it to the bottom, someone would yell "FENCE!" and rather quickly we would have to lay down on the sled making it under the fence and onto the frozen pond. This was the biggest thrill, as decapitation was always a possibility as well as the thin ice, drowning with a sled anchor, along with a lousy driver. We were absolute pros in powder blue snowsuits.

So there you have it — a simple pastime of gliding down a hill turned into a warped and twisted violent sport by lunatic third graders. That's what it was like growing up with my brood. How my parents actually survived us I have no idea. I often think of stuff like that as I'm insisting my children sit properly on the sleds, holding tightly to the handles, on a very small slope without any trees or boulders. What an "un-fun" Mommy I am. Thank God my children still can't read yet or I'd have to be hiding half of my columns from them!