The silly season

Smoosh racing? Human foosball? Winter is the time to come out and get crazy.

© Fish Creek

If you feel like acting ridiculous this winter, any number of festivals will reward you for doing it.

You can race a bed, bowl turkeys, toss fish or ride cardboard sleds.

Where you find one weird competition, you'll likely find others. Here are some of the best.

In Door County, Fish Creek crams all kinds of them onto its schedule for Winter Festival : human foosball, snowshoe dancing, bike tossing and toilet-seat tossing.

In fact, Wisconsin towns love to toss all kinds of things at winter festivals, including frying pans.

Most of these events are odd but more or less self-explanatory. An exception is smoosh racing, where four people attach themselves to two 8-foot planks and attempt to move forward.

You can see it at the Hot Air Affair in Hudson, Wis., and the City of Lakes Loppet in Minneapolis, where it's called crew ski.

Pickleball is like badminton played with a lower net and oversized flyswatters, and it can be learned at Janboree in the Milwaukee suburb of Waukesha.

Poker runs can be made with any kind of conveyance; participants draw playing cards at checkpoints, and the best hand wins. There's one at Mackinaw City's Winter Fest, along with outhouse races.

Let the silliness begin!