Feb 6, 2026 3 min read

So I’m outside trying to get the dog to find a place and I happen to look skyward.

There, hanging from the eaves of my roof are some of the most impressive stalactites I’ve ever seen outside of a cave.

There were dozens of icicles, each of them long and sharp and aimed menacingly toward my upturned face.

As Ralphie’s mother in the movie “A Christmas Story” famously said when the boy blamed a falling icicle for his broken eyeglasses, “Those things have been known to kill people.”

And as it turns out, that’s true. Every year an estimated 15 people are killed by falling icicles. And while I have a better chance of winning Olympic gold in the luge than to be taken down by an ice dagger, I decided to eliminate them.

The ones hanging from the eaves over the garage were the easiest. For some it took only a big jump to clobber them with my hands. Some came down with a broom. They crashed to the driveway pavement with such shattering force that I wondered what would have become of my car windshield if one of them had fallen on it as I was pulling in or out of the garage. I walked to the end of the driveway to get a look at what else was hanging from the higher part of the roof. It did not look good.

Icicles the height of a kindergartner were suspended in clumps of eight or 10 from the roof over the bedroom window — too high for a broom. This would take some power and precision. I grabbed a head-sized clump of snow, wound up and hurled it at the icicles, missing them but hitting the bedroom window with a sickening splat. Any harder or more to the left and I might have broken the window.

As I stood there pondering my next move, I thought about the news reports I’ve been seeing about ice dams that are building up in gutters during the cold snap and causing indoor flooding.

This is a new roof — two months old – and I’m still paying it off. Would a new roof still get icicles?

As I looked down my side of the street at the row of condos, every one had icicles, but not the homes on the other side of the street. Is that because of the way the wind blows up here? The way the sun hits us? Sun is the one thing that might help during this cold spell. And it’s supposed to get a bit warmer next week.

That whistle pig in Punxsutawney predicted six more weeks of this. I think it will be April before the big piles of dirty snow are gone. Even with the roads clear, driving is dangerous because of narrowed lanes and obstructed sight lines. Every time I leave my neighborhood, I must pull extra far onto the road to see around the snow dune that the plows deposited there. This snow might have been pretty for about 10 minutes, but now it needs to go.

So do the icicles. If I were a better shot, I might be able to bring down some of the biggest ones. Instead, I’ll just have to stay out of their way, and keep the dog out from under them, too.

As for Ralphie, he lied. A falling icicle didn’t break his glasses; it was kick-back while shooting his new BB gun that did it. But could an icicle have broken his glasses? These icicles of mine totally could.