12. Build a Snowman

Complete: 12/30/2012

Winter Wonderland (courtesy of Cyndi)

Snow, what a fascinating phenomenon to someone who's lived her entire life in Hawaii. As much as I love the paradise I live in, I longed to experience a white winter just once in my lifetime. Local weather in Hawaii rarely dips under the 60s, and humidity remains at a consistent high. With family up in Canada, there was perfect opportunity to head up north for the holidays and experience a true winter.

To take advantage of this snow experience, I figured I should come up with a list of must-do's. Two made it to my bucket list, the first being to try a snow sport, and the title of this post. Additionally, I sort of had a snowball fight, made a snow angel, and went sledding to get my fix of fun in the snow.

 

Snow angel

Now back to building a snowman. A few days prior, I had sprained my wrist while snowboarding, so it wasn't exactly the easiest to try to build a snowman on my own. And seeing as how it's more enjoyable to accomplish this in the company of others, my cousin Jeanne kindly decided to help me out. Even though she hates winter and was also feeling under the weather, she was awesome enough to agree to help me out when none of my other available family members that evening wanted to, so she is a cool cat in my book. Dave was also interested in helping me build a snowman, but the conditions of the snow on the day we went snowboarding when we first tried it out weren't ideal, and so we had to forgo it at that time. Just thought it was worth mentioning since I like to give acknowledgement where acknowledgement is due.

 

Final product

Before embarking on the snowman adventure, I envisioned creating a life-size snowman. But as reality sunk in, my ambitions were downsized. For the base, we basically dug up surrounding snow and patted it into a ball-like shape. We then thought we could do the same for the second layer, but soon discovered that it doesn't really work that way. We somehow found a way to make it manage though. For the head, there was no getting around it, so we had to resort to rolling a snowball. Now the act of rolling a snowball is nowhere near as easy as it looks in movies. The snowfall that we had to work with was of a powdery consistency, which is not the ideal form of snow to build a snowman. It needed to be more icy in order to be packed more densely and have snow stick as it got rolled into a bigger snowball, so we had to create such conditions by adding water. Jeanne was in charge of packing the snow and attempting to roll it, while I summoned bowls of water from my sister in the house to add to the snowball to increase its volume. When we felt it was substantial enough, I had the honor of carrying the snowball head and affixing it atop the snowman. 

Afterwards, we headed into the house to find stuff to give our snowman a face and some limbs. The ingenious Jeanne found some cherry tomatoes that we used for the eyes, a small piece of basil stem to use as the mouth, and branches from the backyard to use for the limbs. Marc also helped by giving us a candy cane to use for the nose. After finishing our masterpiece, we had to name the guy. We somehow decided on Quan (our eldest cousin).

 

Sledding with Raynor

In assessing the winter experience, I'd say that I'm glad I experienced it once in my  life. While I did satisfy my excitement to see snow and play in it, the novelty of winter wore off much quicker than I thought it would. Everyone who has been in it kept telling me that snow is not as grand and exciting as I think it will be, but of course, I dismissed those comments until I finally experienced the snow myself and found their statements to be accurate. I can definitely understand why people don't like living through winters, since it is very inconvenient, cold, and makes you so lazy and idle for months on end. But, nothing beats having the family come together for the holidays, which we were able to do for the first time when both my sister and I and our cousin Cyndi from California went up. On top of that, our other cousin Marc, whose been teaching in Korea, made a surprise appearance (the adults didn't know that he was coming home for winter), and we were there for the birth of our baby cousin Chloe! 

Births of babies are always exciting!