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Curiously enough, another painting by Bruegel, Hunters in the snow,

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hunters_in_the_Snow

is prominently featured in Tarkovsky's Solaris, which is discussed in another thread on the front page of HN today. Cultures and ideas move in mysterious ways.

I first saw this painting in the intro to Melancholia, by Lars von Trier. I’ve had it as my desktop background for years. It reminds me a lot of the feeling of watching all your neighbors shovel after a snowstorm. Funny that the movie communicates an unsettling and existential story that is the opposite of cosy.
I did a one thousand pieces puzzle of this painting this winter.

Suffice to say, it did take a while.

If Bruegel painted it today it would just show an iPad.
"stirring excrement with a stick"
One of my classmates in elementary school lived close to a closed factory. The backyard with lot of scrap was a wonderful adventurous playground. The city train station was further down the street and the trains passed just behind the fence furthest in the back. When someone heard a train approaching he would yell "Train's coming!". Whatever play would cease immediately and we all ran to pick up one of our poops on a stick and line up at the fence. Great was the joy when one of us hit a window.
> Whatever play would cease immediately

just like the christmas truce of 1914

Never played that. It seems for promoting composting? [1] Looking on Internet without a concise answer [2]. Research [3]

[1] https://fitznaturalist.com/2021/01/01/poop-in-the-woods-does...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shit_stick

[3] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=+sti...

For promoting composting? Jesus, I don't think you've ever been within 50 feet of a child, nevermind having been one at some point in the long-distant past.

It's fundamental play. Sight, smell, touch are stimulated, in the context of incremental, controlled danger, and tool manipulation.

The poop is "bad", but it's stationary, so safe to approach and investigate the edges of.

Subgames include:

- breaking the crusty layer on the surface, revealing fresh shit inside

- getting close enough to smell the poop, learning how the hedonic treadmill works

- breaking it into pieces

- smooshing it back together

- trying to pick up pieces with the stick

- showing the poop to other kids, seeing if they are disgusted or interested

This reply is more thorough and wholesome that I'd imagine a reply to "poking excrements with a stick" could be - or should be.
Pretty sure we played all of these as kids.
Another culture... other games. Don't overestimate your experiences and culture please.
If you (re)read the grandparent comment, you’ll find that most of what is being talked about is not related to culture, but with nature.
If you read my message it talks about experience. This is an ad hominem attack.
I only remember doing this as a kid out of curiosity and to annoy other people :)
As a young adult I arrived late in the middle of the night at a remote place and unrolled a tent exactly over a cow patty. The smell and sensations I could not point to in the dream or in the tent. I have worked for less than three hours at a metro sewerage plant. I heard stories of workers being washed away and drowning in the sewer.
Arguably, that's more of an adult's game now, at least in the Slashdot comments section
"shitstirring"
no way to avoid poop on a farm with animals all around.
"Inflating a bladder to create a balloon or ball" wow
Yes. Funny to find this here. This is actually still quite common in my home-town Riedlingen in Swabian Albs during carnival festivites. You can see in the picture [1] that they have attached the bladders to a stick, and the tradition is to hit people on the head with this :o)

[1]: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narrenzunft_Gole

I think Laura Ingalls Wilder talked about that in Little House in the Big Woods.