One Great Thing About This Otherwise Crappy Time Of Year Is That You Can Make Maple Syrup...

Henry Blodget / Business InsiderWe make it the old-fashioned way - with buckets.

Kurt Vonnegut used to say that there were actually six seasons in the year: winter, spring, summer, and fall...and "locking" and "unlocking."

"Locking," Vonnegut said, comes between fall and winter, when leaf-season is over and the world is hunkering down but real winter has yet to arrive. "Unlocking" comes at the end of the winter, when the world has begun to thaw, but you still haven't reached spring.

These two seasons tend to be bi-polar and confusing.

But if you live in the northern United States and have access to some woods, there's a fun thing you can do with the "unlocking" season...

Make maple syrup!

That's what I did when I was a kid.