This morning Al and I were scheduled to participate in the Klondike Derby, a Boy Scout event that emphasizes teamwork and outdoor skills. Webelos Scouts get to go along to see what it’s like to be a Boy Scout. Webelos parents get to go along because the younger boys still need more adult supervision. But no one got to go this morning because at 9 o’clock, the temperature was still six degrees below zero, and Scout leaders decided it would be better to wait till next weekend and hope for slightly warmer weather.
This parent was not at all disappointed. But my son was, so I suggested we go outside and make a snowman. I looked for creative snowman ideas on the internet, while my son came up with his own idea, which involved lots of baseball caps. I’m not sure we could have managed to make a snowman big enough to use baseball caps for buttons, but it quickly became obvious once I got outside that we weren’t going to make a traditional three-ball snowman at all. This powdery stuff just doesn’t pack.
I had seen one snowman on the internet that gave me an idea, however. It’s a candy snowman, made to look like a mostly melted snowman. The snow we have outside isn’t melting anytime soon, but the closest we could come to a snowman was a shapeless mass that might look like it was melting. Having no better ideas, my son agreed, and we set about making Defrosty. I don’t think he’ll win the local snowman building contest, but he has a certain charm.
If you’d like to check out some other unusual snowmen, here is the world’s smallest “snowman.” He’s actually made of tin and platinum, not snow, but at 1/5 the width of a human hair, I guess he’s impressive just for his diminutive size. Probably snow doesn’t come that small.
At the other end of the size scale, the town of Bethel, Maine, holds the world’s record for the biggest snowman. In 1999, they made Angus, 113 feet tall. In 2008, since no one else had surpassed their record, they decided to do it themselves. This time they made a snowwoman, Olympia, who was 122 feet tall. You may get an idea of her size when you realize that her eyelashes are skis. She weighed 13 million pounds, and took until July of that year to melt. (Angus had melted in June.)
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