In case your TV remote misfired over the weekend, as you switched between the dozens of football games, you might have seen a commercial that brought a big smile to many of us who still remember how we hoped that Santa might bring us a Flexible Flyer.

The commercial is called Joy Ride. It shows a wind-blown trio of senior women bundled up as they sit outside watching a gaggle of laughing kids slide down a snow-covered hill. The next scene shows one of them ordering seat pads from Amazon. The smiling woman then passes the pads out to her pals. After fitting them onto plastic sleds, the three sit down on them and slide down the hill.

As youngsters watch from the side, the grinning grandmas break out million-dollar smiles and laugh as they recreate the simple childhood pleasure of scooting down a snow-covered hill. 

For many of us, including an Old Scribbler, it is a scene that wakens memories from a long time ago. 

If you are reading this column on your smartphone, I encourage you to pause and Google the words: Flexible Flyer.

Those of us who remember ignoring frozen fingers and tingling toes for a chance to risk one more run down a steep hill we called the Devil’s Backbone, the FF was considered the Ferrari of sleds. 

It was invented in 1861 in Paris, Maine, by Henry F. Morton. Today, his family still produces the FF and other fine winter products in South Paris.

Today, if you can coerce your grandkids to drop their phones and play outside, it is a supervised activity involving uniforms and protective gear. It was not that way for grandpa and grandma.

After school, once Mother Nature sent us a half foot of the white stuff, our neighborhood gang would rush to pull on a couple of pairs of wool socks, buckle our feet into rubber boots, grab old pea coats with old sweaty watch caps already stuffed in the pockets, and head out the door for the nearest sliding hill.

Sometimes, along the way to the hill, when no one was looking, I am told that some of the gang would run, flop down on the FF and grab the back bumpers of slow-moving sedans and slide along the ice-covered streets. Of course, I would never do this and urge others to avoid this practice.

When I would muse about winter sledding, my late bride, a proud daughter of East Boothbay, would always top my story by telling of how her neighborhood pals used to slide down the long Route 96 hill all the way from Bill Tompkin's old filling station down to the shipyards below. 

Where I grew up, we did not have a great long hill.

To get to our hill, we had to cross a small brook with a wonderful name: Pleasant Run. For the record, the waters were not pleasant. At that time, the stream was home to numerous combined storm/sewage outlets that fed into the pre-EPA-regulated waters of said Pleasant Run.

Of course, we had to cross the stream to get to the hill, and there was no bridge. Usually, the ice looked OK, but we were not sure. So we would urge a large kid named Phil to test the ice before the rest of us ventured across. This stream was about 10 inches deep, not enough water to be dangerous, but it was wet and cold enough to put a damper on a winter afternoon activity.

Reaching the sliding hill, we always found a couple of dozen friends waiting their turn to slide down Browns Hill. Sorry to tell you that wonderful Hill is now home to a gas station.

Sometimes, we flopped down and rode the FF down alone. At other times, we might team up and make a sort of train by holding on to the back runners of the sled in front. These trains could involve four to six sleds traveling together. While it was easy to hook up the train at the top of the hill, getting untangled at the bottom could become a problem. Bruises and worse were common.

When the 6 o’clock bells of Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church rang, it was time to beat feet home for supper. 

To us, it seemed that the longer we walked, the colder our hands and toes got until they started to tingle. 

When we got back home, Mom, a nurse, watched as we held our blue-colored hands under the kitchen faucet. She wanted to make sure we did not run the hot tap water over our frozen paws. And, just to make sure we were warm, she might require us to hold on to mugs filled with steaming hot cocoa, just to make sure our hands and tummies were back at room temperature.

Be warm.