Today is Mardi Gras, Shrove Tuesday or Terça-Feira Gorda, depending on where you’re celebrating. At midnight, New Orleans police will clear out Bourbon Street and declare the official end of the holiday. Revelers in the streets of Port-of-Spain, Trinidad will summon their remaining energy to make a “las’ lap” around the capital city. In Rio de Janeiro, the winner of the annual samba parade will be crowned.

But far north of these warmer destinations where tourists chase away the February blues, one of North America’s oldest cities is commemorating winter in a different style. Québec City’s Winter Carnival has been an annual celebration of all things ice, snow and cold since 1955, with this year’s edition running from February 1-17.

In what might seem like the least hospitable month for an outdoor festival, the Québec provincial capital — where average temps are a high of 21 and a low of 3 degrees Fahrenheit, and where last week wind gusts sent the mercury down to -12 — routinely brings out thousands, all bundled up. They wander the Plains of Abraham, where the French and British battled for control of Canada in 1759 and which has been transformed into a 108-acre park.

Entries in an international snow sculpture competition line the walkways. An ice palace looms large, where local and international musical talent plays weekend concerts. Kids can slide down a simplified luge track or a manicured sledding and tubing hill. Adults can bring their bathing suits to the outdoor winter spa or sip hot drinks spiked with maple syrup-infused whiskey. All of this for the price of a $15 “effigy,” a lanyard with a figurine of Bonhomme Carnival, the snowman mascot, whose cheery faces bedecks just about everything this time of year.

New for 2013, the Lumocité exhibit invited four video artists from around the world to create visual “mappings” of historic building façades in the Old City, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. With the wind chill whipping to near-frostbite levels, frozen flâneurs watch as late as 11pm as the bricks of the city ramparts — Québec is the only walled city in North America — seem to pop out into three dimensions and rearrange themselves like a Tetris board, while speakers blast an electronic score.

Québec City is the undisputed king of winter in North America. It has also played host to four editions of Red Bull Crashed Ice, an insane four-person race down an urban bobsled track in hockey gear. But it is hardly the only city with an “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” attitude toward winter’s worst.

Boston, currently digging out of a historic blizzard, has brought a healthy dose of outdoor art and culture each December 31 for 35 years with First Night, which has grown to become a licensed brand of family-friendly New Year’s Eve activities for cities and towns. Downriver from Québec City, cosmopolitan Montréal — known for its chockablock festival schedule in its precious pleasant summer months — has seen Igloofest, which just wrapped up its seventh year, expand into a fourth weekend of packed dead-of-winter outdoor waterfront raves.

Buffalo’s Winterfest and Powder Keg Festival are on hiatus this year while organizers look for a permanent location, but the cringe-worthily named Flurrious will bring outdoor sports to the city’s Olmsted Park. Meanwhile, every Minnesota day with snow on the ground, and there are a lot of them, is a festival for Minneapolitan cross-country skiers, who can glide along 20 miles of trails groomed by the Park and Recreation Board.

Further afield, the LED-fuelled psychedelics of the Harbin Winter Festival in northeastern China may outdo Québec City, while the Winter Olympic Games are hardly confined to tiny resort towns. Major cities across the world, from Vancouver to Oslo to Sapporo, have played hosted to the Winter Olympic Games, with international visitors crowding their streets whatever the weather.

But while the confines of the Northeast, Upper Midwest and eastern Canada (the dreaded Snow Belt) have long been declared abandoned in favor of the Sun Belt, recent demographics trends suggest otherwise. As a growing collection of cities can attest, life isn’t so bad in the northern latitudes if you know how to play in the snow.

Gregory Scruggs is a Seattle-based independent journalist who writes about solutions for cities. He has covered major international forums on urbanization, climate change, and sustainable development where he has interviewed dozens of mayors and high-ranking officials in order to tell powerful stories about humanity’s urban future. He has reported at street level from more than two dozen countries on solutions to hot-button issues facing cities, from housing to transportation to civic engagement to social equity. In 2017, he won a United Nations Correspondents Association award for his coverage of global urbanization and the UN’s Habitat III summit on the future of cities. He is a member of the American Institute of Certified Planners.