Today in 2020, a landmark day in the central Wisconsin community of Wausau: the city’s long-running ban on snowball fights was finally off the books!
Yes, for over a century, it was at least technically illegal to have snowball fights in parts of Wausau.
If you dig long enough you’ll find head-scratching laws and ordinances like this all over the country.
And usually there’s more to the story than just the part that makes people scratch their heads.
Take Gainesville, Georgia, which passed a law in 1961 that banned eating fried chicken with utensils.
This was actually a publicity stunt for a town that called itself “the poultry capital of the world.”
In Wausau’s case, the measure that had been in the city’s books in various forms since 1884, banned throwing or launching potentially dangerous projectiles at others on city property.
And yes, that could include snowballs, but it wasn’t as if the city sent cops out after groups of kids who were out having fun in the snow.
Wausau police said the ordinance had only been used twice in cases involving snowballs, and in both cases the perpetrators were throwing snow at moving cars (!)
You wouldn’t have known that from the uproar on social media, though.
Users made it sound like the powers that be wanted Wausau to be a winter No Fun Zone.
As the Wausau Daily Herald wrote at the time, “The story itself snowballed.”
After unsuccessfully trying to explain away the controversy, the city council voted to remove the word snowball from the ordinance.
Wausau’s deputy police chief marked the occasion by throwing a snowball at the mayor.
Perfectly legal.
All of this reminds me of a collection on The Public Domain Review.
They took a look back through the history of snowball fights in art, and there are pieces from all over the world, going back to the year 1400!
I mean, where there’s snow, there are usually people trying to throw it.
Snowball fights are legal in Wausau after more than a century. You can thank the viral stories. (Wausau Daily Herald)
Snowball Fights in Art (1400–1946) (Public Domain Review)