Haha, I can believe that made ya love winter! School are never closed here because of snow. Blah! You have no idea how much I envied American children when I learned that schools closed when there was too much snow.
I usually watch the news (or take a look at the headlines if I miss it). I didn’t usually watch the news per se when I was a child, it was more a matter of being in the room when it was on and paying attention when something caught my interest one way or another. I remember all the talk about Becquerel after Chernobyl and I’m very glad I was too young to understand the seriousness of the situation. The ferry catastrophe outside Zeebrugge also made an impact on me, especially when the reporter said that divers had come across dead people starting to dissolve (sorry to be graphic, just repeating what they said). That was the first true cognitive understanding I had of death. Before that I felt sad when I found dead birds. The first news story I reacted to when was a bomb went off on Oslo Central train station in 1982. My mother had taken the train to work that day and I asked my father if that was her when they said a woman was dead. I was scared but I still lacked true cognitive understanding of it. The covering of AIDS is another news story I remember well, and I found it very scary; I was 9.
The next person usually knows what to say.