Winter in
Lambton County

A free holiday tradition run by the City of Sarnia and the Seaway Kiwanis Club, held every year in early December, with lights, crafts, carriage rides, caroling and visits from Santa. The Seaway Kiwanis Animal Farm stays open during the event. Check the City's page below for this year's exact dates.

Canatara Park, 1200 Lake Chipican Drive, Sarnia

The Shores Recreation Centre in Forest and Legacy Recreation Centre in Thedford both offer skating through the winter (both in the Municipality of Lambton Shores). Warwick Township Arena in Watford is another option a little further out. Check each facility directly for the current public skate schedule.

The Shores Recreation Centre, 7883 Amtelecom Pkwy, Forest · Legacy Recreation Centre, 16 Allen St, Thedford · Warwick Township Arena, 61 Centennial Ave, Watford

Branches right across the county, including Sarnia Library downtown, and every one of them is free, warm, and probably closer than you think. Story times and kids' programs run right through the winter, check the branch nearest you for its own schedule.

Sarnia Library, 124 Christina Street South, Sarnia

An indoor mall with a food court, an easy hour of walking around when the weather makes the outdoors a hard sell. Stroller and wheelchair rentals are available on site.

1380 London Road, Sarnia

An independent bookstore in Northgate Plaza, open since 1980, with a genuinely great kids' section. A good browse for a cold afternoon, and an easy way to send a kid home with something new to read instead of another screen.

500 Exmouth Street, Sarnia (Northgate Plaza)

Lake Huron is too big to freeze over completely most winters, but ice builds up along the shallower shoreline and can pile into rough, jumbled ridges after a windy freeze. The St. Clair River, where the lake drains south past Sarnia, usually keeps moving and stays open, but ice from the lake collects at the very top of the river and can form what's called an ice arch. When that arch breaks up, chunks of ice run down the river and sometimes jam together, which can push water levels up and flood the shore nearby. Real Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker ships, including the Griffon and the Samuel Risley, come to the Sarnia area most winters to break up the ice and keep the shipping channel open, a good excuse to watch the river from one of the waterfront parks.

Cold Arctic air blowing across the still-warmer water of Lake Huron picks up moisture and dumps it as snow once it reaches land, called lake-effect snow. It's why Sarnia can get sudden, heavy snow squalls even when the sky was clear an hour earlier.

Groundhogs are true hibernators, they dig deep into an underground burrow and sleep for months, with their heart rate dropping way down. Several kinds of bats spend the winter hibernating in caves, mines, or old buildings. Chipmunks aren't quite true hibernators, they wake up every so often through the winter to snack from the food they stashed in the fall. Skunks and raccoons do something similar, long dormant naps in a den, with the odd trip outside on a mild day. The strangest one: wood frogs actually let themselves freeze almost solid in the leaf litter, their heart stops completely, and then they thaw out alive and hop away again in spring. Painted turtles bury into the mud at the bottom of a pond and barely move all winter, breathing in tiny amounts of oxygen through their skin instead of coming up for air.

Snowy owls fly down from the Arctic tundra most winters and are often spotted sitting right out in the open, on farm fields, fence posts, or near the airport, since that's the kind of wide-open country they're used to hunting in. Unlike most owls, they hunt in broad daylight. Bald eagles stick around all winter along the open, fast-moving stretches of the St. Clair River, since fishing is easier there than on a frozen lake. Smaller birds like dark-eyed juncos, American tree sparrows and snow buntings actually migrate down from further north to spend winter here, so a little grey-and-white junco at the backyard feeder is really a visitor from much colder country. Lambton Wildlife, the local nature club, runs winter bird counts if your family wants to try real bird-watching.