10 ways Montreal's cold weather can kill: How to avoid death during January's inverse construction holidays

   Think of January 14-28 as the inverse construction holidays.
   The July construction holidays are Montreal's hottest.
   Six months later it's the inverse. These are the coldest weeks.
   These are not 14 days to be embraced, appreciated or celebrated.
   There is no kicking back with a cold brew and hearing the crickets chirping: instead it's deathly silence as the Grim Reaper hides behind your icy door.
  The inverse construction holidays are to be survived.
   The winter can and will kill you and you're too young and gorgeous for an icy grave.
   Here are 10 ways winter kills:

1. Freezing to death Your body tells you it doesn't want to be cold. You should obey your body and just get back inside. There's nothing out there for you. Lack of warmth will kill you real, real fast as a pair of orphans discovered in 1922. Or ask the man who died of cold while visiting a shooting range in 1934 in Pointe aux Trembles in 1934  And then there's the 12-year-old boy who froze while hiding under stairs in Brossard in 1973. Others? Plenty!
2. Vigorous shoveling causing heart attack People used to dutifully shovel their walkways for fear that if they didn't the mailman wouldn't be able to deliver cheques. So that's not much of a thing anymore. It can wait. Winter will end. The snow will melt. Examples: in Quebec in Dec 1972 - 10 people died of snow shoveling related heart attacks after 12 inches fell in Montreal. 
3. Death by snowmobile About 25-30 people die every year in Quebec as a result of riding on snowmobiles. Leave that stuff to someone else. Someone with a death wish.
4. Get hit by a snowplow Snow clearance drivers get into a hypnotic trance thinking that they have to clear every last damn flake of the ground and frequently hit pedestrians, resulting in death of such good young people Jessica Holman Price who died in Westmount in 2005. Three others died in 2009 in similar circumstances. 
5. Skidding on icy roads Your car will slip and go into that ditch. Yes it will and stop arguing. In March 1971 26 died in Quebec due to a 20-inch snowstorm, with many of them being people who lost control of their vehicles, or whose cars failed them, leaving them to freeze to death behind the wheel. 
6. Killed by lack of visibility When nobody can see five feet in front of them they end up walking in front of trains, cars and toboggans. Loads of us died in a storm in February 1968, with several deaths caused by lack of visibility. They included Guiseppe Ceratti, 42 of Grenon St. who died when colliding with another vehicle at Acadie and Fleury. I am thinking he was a heck of a good guy. 
7. Snow collapse/avalanche Kids who play in snow forts routinely die. Men digging in snow have been known to die as well, as occurred in 1949. And while most Montrealers don't have to worry too much about dying in an avalanche, it has happened in Quebec, as witnessed when eight died in Kangisqsualujjuaq village in Northern Quebec in 1999. 
8. Death by fire Toss another log on the fire, or set up some dodgy contraption that will lead to a blaze? Recipes for disaster and death. Perhaps the worst of those winter blazes happened at St. Denis and Sherbrooke which claimed 11 on Feb. 16, 1955. 
9. Falling ice Those chunks of ice are coming down and can kill. A four-year-old child was killed outside the Edinburgh Cafe at St. Catherine and McGill College in 1907. Countless others were surely claimed in a similar way since.
10. Scarf strangulation  You like turtlenecks? Too bad, you've got to wear one anyway because the alternative, scarves, are killers unless you're in a place where you don't need one, and that applies to Jimmy Page only. Just last year a poor woman was pulled down to her death at the Fabre metro as the neck warming garment was pulled into the machinery, causing her to smash her head.  She was not alone, Antonio Pelletier was killed in March 1971 when he scarf got caught in his snowblower in St. Damase. You don't want to die like that. 
11. Slipping on ice Wealthy Webber Burrill, 92, slipped and died on Monkland Ave. in 1939. Porter Henry James, 45, died after slipping under a train in 1934. Who else died in slips? Too many to mention.

Proposal? Stay at home. Don't go out until spring is here.