Paralyzed with JOY!: Once There Was a Snowman

My sister Sharon and her family were hoping for a white Christmas this past year, and so was I. I adore snow and there's just something about it that makes Christmas even more special. Sadly, we had a green Christmas this year, but we did get a little bit of snow a few days later. It wasn't much–less than 2 inches–but it was fun to watch it fall and it made everything very pretty. The kids were so excited about it and they went outside to play as soon as they saw it start to snow.

The next morning Sharon's husband went outside to clear the snow off their van and move it because Sharon, Chandra and I were going to the movies to see Les Misérables. The kids went outside and had a blast playing in the snow. When we came home from the movie there was a snowman in the front yard. The kids wanted to have it facing the house, so they strategically placed it in front of the big window in my bedroom. We nicknamed the frosty voyeur "Peeping Tom" since he was only a few feet away from the house and looked right into my window.

I was surprised that the snow stuck around for so long for as little as there was. It was fun to watch the deterioration of the snowman as he melted. The snowman stuck around for 13 days which I think is pretty amazing since we've been having such temperatures.

At church the kids sing a song called Once There Was a Snowman and it's a perfect one to sing in this situation:

"Once there was a snowman, snowman, snowman,
once there was a snowman, tall, tall, tall.
In the sun he melted, melted, melted,
in the sun he melted, small, small, small."

These are pictures of the snowman the day he was built, complete with charcoal eyes/buttons, a lei crown (it slipped off on one side), a newspaper hat and a carrot nose..

The snowman started melting not too long after it was built, and my mom documented the snowman's demise every step of the way by taking daily pictures of it with her iPad (and sometimes even photographing it more than once a day depending on how it was melting).

This is the snowman five days after being created. His carrot nose started out so nice and straight, but by this point it was starting to droop.

After a few more days the snowman had lost both of his eyes, his buttons and his nose.

Here's my mom standing by the snowman who had gotten much shorter and thinner after eight days. "I'm melting!"

Another picture of Mom posing with the snowman. Later that day the snowman lost his head.

Here's a picture the headless snowman and the few lumps which is all that remained of his head.

The sun was much more direct on the snowman's left side, so it melted more quickly than the snowman's right side. About 60 seconds after my mom took the picture on the left, the snowman's middle [what was left of it] toppled to the ground. Mom had just walked inside, so she missed it, but I caught it out of the corner of my eye.

After a mild night where we got a lot of rain there wasn't much left the snowman (picture on the left). The next morning my mom took the picture on the right. All that was left of the snowman was a tiny fistful of snow in the upper left corner of the picture.