‘Sledding’ or ‘sleigh riding’ – How do you describe sliding down a hill of snow?

This week hundreds of children across New Jersey found the biggest hill they could find in their town to slide down on the snow following a storm that dropped more than 30 inches of snow.

News 12 Staff

Feb 9, 2021, 1:29 PM

Updated 1,403 days ago

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This week hundreds of children across New Jersey found the biggest hill they could find in their town to slide down on the snow following a storm that dropped more than 30 inches of snow.
News 12 New Jersey’s Brian Donohue says that while growing up in Union Township, he and everyone else he knew referred to this act as “sleigh riding.”
But he says that it was only when he went to college in Boston that he realized that people in the other parts of the country referred to the action as “sledding.” He says that his friends still give him grief about this.
“It was ‘sledding,’ but [Brian] called it ‘sleigh riding’ as though it was something out of Narnia or the Bavarian wild, where you had horses drawing sleighs,” says Mike Doherty, a friend of Donohue's.
But Donohue’s family stands by its terminology.
“It makes me uncomfortable. ‘Sledding.’…it just doesn’t sound right,” says Donohue’s brother Billy.
Donohue says that he has still found plenty of people who call the action “sleigh riding,” and found that it seems to be more common in the northern part of the Garden State. He found a notice put out by Atlantic Highlands police before this week’s snowstorm telling residents not to sleigh ride in the streets.
Donohue says that the situation is reminiscent of the classic New Jersey pork roll versus Taylor Ham debate.