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Hot time in the (c)old town tonight

Tonight begins the best time of the year for Saranac Lakers. Winter Carnival has long provided a fun break from a long, cabin-fever-inducing winter.

Saranac Lake is often the coldest spot in the lower 48 states, and it has played that up in tourism promotion, dubbing itself “the Adirondacks’ Coolest Place.” It’s an apt description for a village that is cool in music, art and theater as well as temperature — and in having the biggest, oldest, quirkiest cold-weather party in the eastern United States.

Coronation, which launches the carnival tonight, is almost surreal in its small-town-ness. We’ve heard people say it’s right out of “Northern Exposure’s Cicely, Alaska, or “The Andy Griffith Show’s Mayberry, North Carolina. The Rotary Show next Friday puts a weirder spin on that. The parade and fireworks are always highlights, as are the many activities the first Saturday — i.e., tomorrow.

If you haven’t been here for it in a while, come this year. Bring a friend. Bring two.

The Enterprise is the essential, go-to source of Carnival information. A guide to the activities and the royalty is tucked inside today’s paper; you can pick up extra copies at our office. Yesterday’s Weekender section featured a great live music lineup for Carnival this year. The paper’s main section carries Carnival news every day, and to pull it all together online, we have a Winter Carnival news category on the homepage of our website.

Monday’s paper will be full of photos and news of the weekend’s activities, and we’ll keep covering Carnival events all week. We’ll publish tons of photos in print, but on top of that we’ll post plenty of photo galleries on our CU website, CU.AdirondackDailyEnterprise.com.

Next Friday, we’ll continue the celebration with our annual spoof issue, the Emptyprize. Then on parade day, our staff be all over it, taking tons of photos to run in print and online.

Winter Carnival was started in the 1890s by tuberculosis patients for whom the fresh-air cure had succeeded. They had spent winters sitting out on cure porches: bundled up, inactive and sick. When they got better, they were ready to stretch their limbs and celebrate life.

Besides, TB was a disease that largely affected young people, so many of these survivors were in their 20s. They wanted to socialize, play sports, eat, drink, flirt, what have you. They had just beaten a terminal illness and wanted to live it up.

That spirit lives on, but so does the spirit of community. Winter Carnival was born shortly after this village was incorporated. It was a new, booming, cosmopolitan place, in its earliest flush of bonding. At the time, Carnival’s grandiosity was ambitious on the level of the winter fests in Quebec City and St. Paul, Minnesota.

These days it is less ambitious and more community-oriented, as Saranac Lake is in general now. Nevertheless, it’s still a big deal. The traditional highlights still glitter with the same magic, the newer activities are wacky and fun, and the good mood is infectious (while the TB is not).

Welcome to the good times.

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