Woah I always assumed that was for mosquitos and stuff or possibly? I guess perhaps even scorpions or snakes but yeah that is cool to know even further north or in cold areas it was common to have high beds like that with the roofed beds so to speak.. just albeit not using a mere screen around them but a thicker cloth.
0:55 I always figured a muff was made of toilet paper in all honesty. Based on the white toilet paper roll looking thing in a lot of kids cartoons over the hand XD.
When I was a child in the 1960s, in the anthracite coal fields of Pennsylvania, we lived in an old house that was flat-out primitive by 2021 standards. Down the cellar lived something out of a 1950s horror movie: an iron monster with horns that always had a pipes to the outside.) Upstairs in the living room, the heat came up through the ornate iron grate in the floor, but there was no register upstairs. We were warm enough from the time we came home from school until the time we went to bed, because we spent most of that time , in the kitchen near the coal-fired stove that never went out. (This wasn't so nice for my mother in the summer though!) We had a few days every winter when the temperature went down to -5°F or lower, and it seemed that the furnace would wait for those days to take a vacation. One of my warmest memories is of my grandmother, an immigrant from Slovakia, who made a comforter back in the 1930s from the chickens that families kept in their gardens. We usually took turns using the comforter, but on the coldest nights three of us would hunker down in one bed under it. None of us thought any of this was a horrendous way to live, because we didn't know there was anything unusual about it. It was how everybody in our neighborhood lived. Besides, there was a pond nearby for skating, and four feet of snow to play in was hardly rare, and for my birthday in November one year I got a woolly muff trimmed with rabbit fur, and my mother's holupki would warm up Dan Scratch. . . . Oh, wait --- there is one thing I remember with loathing, and that's the nasty, sulphur-y smell of anthracite coal as it burns. Dan Scratch might find it appealing, but not this kid!
@deborahburger5816, Thank you for the great description of your childhood winter, and mentioning a few of the similarities to a Victorian winter! Cheers.
