Frozen Dead Guy Day
And the celebration of life.
On the night after the holiday of Shavuot, I opened the news and discovered that my home town of Boulder, Colorado, had suffered a terrorist attack. This was while I was crouching in my safe space, listening the the siren outside my home in Israel.
“What a coincidence!” I exclaimed. “We’re getting bombed, and they’re getting bombed.”
I immediately subscribed to the Boulder Daily Camera, newspaper of my youth, comics of my Sundays, in order to be an informed citizen.
Taking advantage of my one free article, I read about a festival in Estes Park, Colorado. Estes Park is a touristy little mountain town, and the festival is called, “Frozen Dead Guy Day”.
Again I thought, “What a coincidence! They’re celebrating death, and our Hamas neighbors are also celebrating death!” But no, they are not the same. The revealers in Estes Park are just having fun, whereas Hamas is dead serious.
Anyhow, there was this Norwegian guy named Bredo Morstøl who died in 1989. In the moments after his death, his daughter and grandson decided to make him into Norwegian ice cream. They dry-iced him until they could perform cryogenics on him, which basically is like making your Zeidy into a popsicle (or artic, as we say in Israel), and placing him into your Amcor refrigerator until you are ready to listen to his stories and feed him with a spoon. Today he would be more than 120 years old!
This is not a joke. It is true. They really did this thing to poor Saba Bredo. 2
After icing Bredo, Aud and Trygve Bauge, his daughter and grandson, were kicked out by ICE. Well not really, but their visas did in fact run out, so they ran back to their icy hjemlandet, Norway.
In recognition or in celebration or maybe in memory of old Bredo, there is a festival from March 27-29, 2026, (no, I do not get commission) featuring:
Coffin races. A group of people carry a coffin while racing others who are doing the same thing. I am not making this up.
Cryogenic cannibal race. I am not kidding.
General drinking and partying.
Fun facts:
“Cryonics (from Greek: κρύος kryos, meaning ‘cold’) is the low-temperature freezing and storage of human remains in the hope that resurrection may be possible in the future.
Cryonics is regarded with skepticism by the mainstream scientific community. It is generally viewed as a pseudoscience,[3] and its practice has been characterized as quackery.”3
But I disagree with Wikipedia and the mainstream scientific community. Theoretically, the vivifying of the dead is not that difficult. Birth, on the other hand, is a wonder which quantum leaps above resurrecting the dead.
Think about it: matter does not disappear in a dead person. The brain, the dried blood, the flesh. All of the elements are there; you just have to incorporate a soul.
But birth? The elements are created nearly ex nilo, out of nothing.
Believe me, not only have I myself been born, but I have given birth, and I have been to a number of births. It ain’t easy, and it ain’t what I call fun. (Many people disagree with me, but those people use epidurals.) Notwithstanding the discomfort, nothing compares to the miracle of birth.
Think about all of the complex steps involved in a birth day:
Conception is a miracle in itself. If you don’t believe me, just ask any childless couple.
Pregnancy: every cell must be formed in its own time. If the head grows faster, that is a problem. If the baby is born before the lungs are formed, that is a problem. And so on.
Labor. Multiple mechanisms must occur nearly simultaneously in order for labor to begin: fetal signalling, placental hormone shift, Ferguson Reflex…(from ChatGPT)
Birth: One minute he is all cozy, enveloped in that warm little sanctuary, and the next minute he is thrown out like a renter evicted onto the cold pavement.
Breathing: a minute ago this tiny person got all of its nourishment from the placenta. And then, a second after birth (she/her, he/him) is expected to breathe this colourless, odourless, tasteless element, otherwise known as oxygen. Going from breathing nothing to breathing air. I am not making this up.
(By the way, getting the placenta out is no carnival either. When it got stuck and stubbornly tried to stay inside, my daughter called me after a birth and said, “Why do people give birth at home. It’s scary!”)
Taking into consideration Frozen Dead Guys in general and Mr. Morstøl in particular, resurrection of the dead is a small rivulet. Elementary, actually.
Birth and life, on the other hand, are all of the oceans and the rivers and the rains and the joyful tears that ever were and ever will be. There’s no comparison.
https://www.britannica.com/place/Estes-Park
https://frozendeadguydays.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryonics
A thoughtful perspective.
Deep, but also entertaining.