Mountain Top PA
2008
by Jennifer

Caroling, caroling thru the snow Christmas bells are ringing

QUOTE: Spread CHRISTMAS Joy

The Snowman: A brief history of a winter entertainment

Making snowmen is a near-universal activity for those in northern climates; it is likely even prehistoric. Yet, due to the snowman's transitory nature, there are few visual records of snowmen prior to the 19th and 20th centuries when advertising and print media locked them in time.

There are even fewer artifacts that we can specifically attribute to a snowman: buckets, carrots, sticks, berries, and coal are repurposed or return to nature. As with sandcastles, the joy of the snowman is that you don't need special equipment to make one - the snowman is for everyone and only limited by imagination.

The history of making humans, animals, angels, policemen, or other figures out of snow can reveal quite a lot about a specific culture in time, while also providing a kindred link to the past.

https://www.obscurehistories.com/post/the-snowman-a-brief-history-of-a-winter-entertainment

Before "snowmen," snow figures were called the more inclusive "snow puppets," or snow dolls. "Snow-man" as a proper title can be traced to 1827, but making figures out of snow was as commonplace as they come in recorded history, particularly during the period of the Little Ice Age, which lasted from the fourteenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries. During this period, the climate dipped into cooler temperature, and heavy snowfalls were more frequent.