Dressing for the polar vortex. A basic guide to dressing warm.

As a Wisconsin guy with a couple outdoor winter hobbies I'm not particularly bothered by the -20 so much as the -20 with high winds. Zero in the sun with calm winds is fairly comfy. Windy and 40F sucks.

Cotton kills. If you stay dry, the warm usually takes care of itself, if you get wet you'll die doesn't matter how thick your clothes are (which is the long format explanation of cotton kills). Overwork until sweaty = dead. No source of fire in an emergency equals dead. Small roll of duct tape so a wardrobe malfunction doesn't equal frostbite or dead. Spare gloves when you accidentally soak your main gloves. Ditto socks. No emergency kit in the car (blankie, that kind of thing) equals dead. Being outside in pair with a partner saves more lives WRT first aid etc than buying any specific type of warm undies or boots. I donno if you're better off walking around naked rather than walking around wet like the old timers say, but its a coin toss. I'd never wear anything if its gotten wet.

What I consider reasonable for long distance snow shoeing in the middle of nowhere or visiting my ice fishing relatives in the middle of a mostly frozen lake might not correlate with the requirements of someone walking to and from their car in the parking lot.

If it hurts its probably not frostbitten, so if you haven't even started crying yet, you're fine, not even hurt yet. If you were crying but now it doesn't hurt anymore, that's because its frozen so may as well start driving to the ER right now.

Slowing down and paying attention will save more lives than a specific model of shirt.

If your core is warm, you can get away with some stupid clothes on your extremities and they'll still be warm. If your core is cold, nothing you put on your extremities will warm them up. If your hands are cold the solution is zip up your coat or put on a sweater, not play games with multiple layers of gloves (unless its really cold)

For you southerners who never seen snow before, my advice is don't eat the yellow snow. Even if some Yankee tells you its lemonade flavored or whatever.

Also northerners with northerner reflexes, even old people, can dance around normally on black ice that would result in a southerner, even a teenager, falling and breaking a bone, even if they try to be careful. Something about internalizing reflexes about balance and center of gravity or something. When I was in the Army the relative performance of northerners and southerners on ice even just plain snow was always fairly comedic. Their driving is like that too, the southerners would cry and wet themselves over what the experienced northerners considered pretty good travel conditions. I had a lot of good southerner friends but they always drove me bonkers in the winter. No, you can't get frostbite when its 40 out, by definition, although you can die pretty well of hypothermia at 40, and if you think early October is terrifying wait till January...