I was a teenager during the blizzard of '78, and I remember it well. Woke up to hear it was a SNOW DAY and when we tried to open the front door, we couldn't! The snow had blown up against the front screen door, about 2/3 of the way up the window. We thought it was so fun, we opened the garage door and dug a man sized tunnel from the garage to the front door. That lasted all of about 30 minutes before my Dad got tired of waiting on us, and shoveled out our tunnel.
But there was plenty of snow to tunnel, dig, shovel, throw, and build with. The roads in the neighborhood were so blocked that we were stuck in the house for 3 days. My Dad along with all the other "men" in the neighborhood got out in their driveways first, then the streets second to try to make a path in the several feet of snow that came down. We even had a guy with a brand new plow on his pickup truck give it a shot. He made some progress, but was not familiar with using the blade, so he would back up, rev the engine, get some speed, drop the blade, and the snow would fly... then THUNK. Dead stop. The third time he did it there was a CRACK instead of a THUNK... and his brand new blade broke. The neighborhood guys helped him pull off the blade and put it in the bed of the truck, while he sniffled back a tear, and they went back to shoveling.
Seems like we spent a week out of school that year, but they made us pay for it with an extra week in the summer (boo - hiss).