I'm hoping some of the English members can enlighten me - what are chilblains? I come across them fairly often in English books, especially older ones, and can't quite figure them out. I get the impression that they are sores, caused by working in cold weather. Now, we certainly have cold weather here, so I would assume we get these things too, only under a different name.
I work at a job where I wash my hands as many a a hundred times a day on a busy day, and in the winter I do get horrible cracks on my hands, but that is more a function of the dry air, rather than the cold. I'm pretty sure that England is not very dry during the winter.
We also get something here that we call frostbite, but that is not an open sore, just very red and tender, usually the tips of your ears (Wear a hat!!).
So, anybody know what a chilblain is?

Chilblains are red itchy swellings on the feet, legs and hands in cold weather. Sufferers are usually people with poor circulation or who are abnormally sensitive to cold. They're not so common nowadays because we keep ourselves warmer: they used to be quite common when most of us lived in draughty and underheated houses. This may be why you find them mentioned more often in older books.

Well, that doesn't sound at all like anything people get here! If they do get it, it's not very common. I wonder if this is because, although it is colder here outside, we keep our houses warmer?

I used to get them on my smallest toes each winter until we had central heating installed in our house, haven't had one since. The toes would be sore and red, oh and did they itch!

When I was a child our houses used to be poorly heated, most people didn't have central heating and bedrooms would be unheated, in fact most rooms were unheated or very poorly heated. We had an open fire in our sitting room and that was it, a portable parafin heater would be placed in our bedroom for a few hours each evening but that gave out very little heat and it wasn't lit for the whole night. We used to have ice forming on the inside of the windows and icicles hanging from the end of the bed when it was really cold.

Sometimes the toilets would freeze at school and we had none to use, that was agony to have to wait the whole day.

My mum used to make me run barefoot in the snow,as a cure, or she would rub snow onto them, to get the circulation going. This probably why I loathe snow to this day!