“Frosty the snowman / Was a jolly happy soul. With a corncob pipe and a button nose / And two eyes made out of coal. Oh, Frosty the snowman / Was alive as he could be. And the children say he could laugh and play / Just the same as you and me.” Those are only a few of the lyrics to the song Frosty the Snowman. In 1963, The Ronettes version was Certified Gold and is on Rolling Stone’s Greatest Rock & Roll Christmas Songs, even though Christmas is nowhere in the lyrics. The song was first recorded in 1950 by Gene Autry and the Cass County Boys.
Frosty is America’s most well-known snowman
Most Americans know that the basic snowman is made of three extra-large snowballs set atop each other with the smallest ball at the top and the largest at the bottom. These balls represent the human head, torso, and lower body. Arms, such as they are, are made from the branches of bare trees in winter. Snowmen have no legs or feet.
Cartoon characters run around; proper snowmen stand still until they melt
The popular image of Frosty has been animated many times, and on the kiddie shows, walks around on two legs. The mobile Frosty impostor looks more like a cross between the Michelin man and the Sta-Puft Marshmallow Man parade balloon in Ghostbusters.
You may not remember Frosty’s origin story
He was an ordinary snowman until some children put a magical hat on his head and he sprang to life. He laughed and played with the kids until the hot sun came out and he told the children he’ll be back again someday.
No one knows when and where someone made the first snowman but we do know several things about snowmen around the world
Since the 7th Century, the Chinese have been carving snow Buddhas
The legends say Buddha tried to get up after staring trance-like at a stone wall for nine years. He couldn’t because his legs no longer worked, so he rolled to Japan through the winter snow to spread the word.
Japanese snowmen
Some snowmen are made to look like the popular yuki-daruma dolls that are modeled after the founder of Zen Buddhism. The Japanese also make snowmen in the form of yuki onna (Scary Snow Woman) and yuki usagi (Snow Bunnies). These days, Sapporo, Japan’s Winter Festival features a display of more than 10,000 mini-snowmen.
In Europe in the Middle Ages, it was a tradition in cities and towns to build snowmen for Winter Festivals and after heavy snowfalls
The snowmen did not look like the snowmen we think of. They were as elaborately fashioned as the sand-building contests on the beach: unicorns, the man in the moon, and below, St. George rescuing the princess from the dragon.
De sneeuwpoppen van 1511
Wikipedia tells the tale of The Miracle of 1511, the snowman festival in Brussels, Belgium. As the story goes, the local residents, fed up with being poor and hungry while Holy Roman Emperors lived in luxury, staged a snowman protest. Townspeople built four dozen pornographic and scatological snowmen mocking church and governmental officials. The highlight was “a naked snowboy urinating into the mouth of a drunken snowman.”
The Schenectady Massacre of 1690
The gate to Fort Schenectady froze open in the blizzard. The soldiers built snowmen to guard the gate while they went inside to get warm. Their attempted deception didn’t work. More than 200 French Canadian soldiers and Native Americans walked through the open and unguarded gate and killed the 60 people inside the fort.
The first known photo of a snowman
It was taken in 1853 by photographer Mary Dillwyn and now resides in the National Library of Wales.
New Year’s Day 1857
Larkin Mead sculpted an 8-foot high statue of an angel, wings and all, from ice and snow in Brattleboro, Vermont. As the story goes, it was so lifelike that the New York Times reprinted the image. It went viral and Mead became an influencer.
The Rites of Spring
The people of Zurich, Switzerland celebrate Sechseläuten, the beginning of Spring, by blowing up a snowman. No, not with air like some of the yard decorations today, but with real explosives.
They stuff an 11-foot tall cotton and straw “snowman” (the Böögg) with explosives. Local tradesmen parade it through the town, throwing bread and sausages to the crowds much as Mardi Gras Krewes toss beads to the revelers. The finale is when the Böögg is placed atop an enormous funeral pyre. When the fire reaches the snowman, the whole thing explodes into flames.
Bonus
Like sandcastles, anyone can make a snowman. The materials are free and you can use your imagination any way you wish.
Snowaddiction.org has a webpage called 30 Of The Most Creative Snowmen You’ve Ever Seen. It has some great ones, including this, my favorite.
The 2025 International Snow Sculpture Championship will be held January 20-29. 2025 in Breckenridge, Colorado. Artists from around the world are given 25-ton blocks of snow to sculpt whatever they want. Here’s the official 2024 International Snow Sculpture Championship winner, “The Beggar,” created by Team Mexico.
Closer Look Corner
Did you notice the Frosty that was used at the beginning of this article to illustrate Autry’s Snowman song had a carrot for a nose instead of the “button nose” Gene described in the lyrics? And did you notice that it isn’t Gene Autry at all, but Roy Rogers, an even more famous cowboy crooner, née Leonard Franklin Slye?
