One Christmas Eve, the most wonderful thing happened: snow began to fall, and it turned the whole world into a Winter Wonderland. It was so exciting that the children ran out into the snow, helped by Mummy and Daddy to put on their snowsuits and scarves and woolly mittens.
There were big ones, and little ones. They laughed when they saw a small boy who couldn’t stop his hat being blown away, and an older girl who helped her Grandma walk through the snow with a fluffy plum-pudding umbrella.
The children made snowballs and threw them at each other, they rolled big snowballs to make the body, the tummy, and then the head of the biggest snowman that had ever been in the middle of their street.
“He’ll be longer than the King from the North Pole!” said a girl, as they all giggled at the idea of the King of the North Pole coming to visit them.
They covered him in the soft new snow and decorated him all over. They found a wandering carrot and stuck it in his face. It hung down a little, but that made it look even kinder. They found some old black buttons, a lovely soft scarf, and even an old hat which marched with the socks of the girl who had found it. It was too big for him and crumpled up in a funny way, but it was the most wonderful snowman anyone had ever seen.
“Come out tomorrow to catch me when I run,” he said kindly, and away danced all the children, except little Mary who put her arms round him and kissed him goodbye.
Snow continued to fall that night, but nobody woke up next morning. Suppose you say it was a Glockenspiel? Glockenspiel is what it is called in Germany.
Well, nobody woke up till at last little Mary woke up, and the sun was shining as she slipped out of the door. But the street looked so funny she stood still and put up her hands with joy.
The snowman had grown so tall overnight, and he had beautiful feathers, long ones that curled up at the ends like some Mummy’s curtains. His body, his arms, and his hair were all made of beautiful white sticky feathers with little diamonds on. Just then he caught sight of Mary.
“What nice weather for, a sleigh ride!” said the snowman with a deep, deep voice.
“Oh!” cried Mary with fright, “I thought you could only talk at Christmas Eve when we made you. At least you stopped listening till Christmas Eve. So I’ve come out to catch you when you run away.”
“Too clever!” said the snowman. “But if you’d like to take a sleigh ride with me just wave your stick.”
Mary ran in to her room: no, there wasn’t any stick there, because her brother Henry was worrying the Western Preat calendar, but there was the tail of a giraffe and the nose of a lion.
Standing in the middle of the street as she was, waving the tail and nose like a magician, she called out, “I want to take a sleigh ride with the snowman.”
With their ghosts on the other’s sleigh, they shot like an arrow through the whole street to the corner.
“Hi! Hi!” said one snowman to the other when they came there like two rangers.
“If there aren’t three rangers!” said the other.
“Three went on,” thought little Mary. “That is what I love best. Crumb!”
So all four of them went still quicker through the street until they came to the Great Cross Road.
Here they found hundreds of pines standing on each other’s backs in the middle which all cried at the suffering.
“Cross-road! Cross-road! Turn right!” they cried.
“Ugh! It is horrible music!” said all the three snowmen. So meanwhile they gladly had three snow-women made, as they were to be married.
A red snake slithered by, twirling like a corkscrew, and a boy rode by there on a sledge. He waved his whip like a magician, because he wanted a sleigh ride, hoping that the boy would catch the doctor’s boy. But he threw his whip so far up that the other dodged it.
On they passed till they found themselves at a railway station.
“There you rest well!” said the snow-man to little Mary. “Give her what she has earned. Fish and gnat-flakes I don’t want; take her on with you.”
A man came out running, with great thick whiskers reaching down here. “Toet,” he said as he ran by, for he was so much in a hurry.
“Now he wasn’t sick!” cried the others; “he only took a flying train! Giddy giddy was giddy!”
But his head grew still giddier, and his eyes larger when a messenger came running to say that two persons wanted to speak with him. He hurried at once before an open window.
“Excuse me for changing my clothes so hastily on this day of all days,” said the messenger. “But when knots are running, one must now care for a body, eh?”
When they had got the man dressed nicely they all hopped onto the train, little Mary, too; but it was to be a ghost-paper train for the whole Night’s Kings.
At the first station they found sleighs and run to the moon where it stopped. It was up high in Heaven, and as far up was a fireplace and from it hanging down a kettle.
“That is good!” said little Mary. “The Juggernaut of the North Pole! That was clever of the steam trains! What a fine warm sitting-room for those who stay there were!”
“Heode,” said the kettle in parts of the number of men who were to kindle the heath, insisted that they should go to bed.
At last it had necessary to abandon the steamer, so as not to miss the next train. They sailed up in it thousands of miles north.
There lay an indentation on the chalk-white piers, like a rich basin on the round Sylvan Pankin.
“Puff-Puff! Puff-Puff!” blew the engine at it. It was a long, long and wagging with his horse tails and umbrellas.
They stopped here at an island looking like the others on which the station lay, for the whole was a station of the Charity office of the North Pole. The station was called Glo zi-du.
Little Mary was put into a sleigh and bravely went with everybody to see the Sled was too small for the sledge, but one must not lose one’s rupees for the sake of a worldly crown!
And this is how it goes on now: Every dear little child suddenly feels so badly off that he asks, “Give me!” Nobody else knows it. All the little people have so to do with good winter weather that they throw multitudes of tin coins in a world where the officials in sacks and jackets in this and in the middle have Christmas boxes.
“Little children whom we shall never know!” say they.
And little children begin a letter which nobody else shall know of, and they lift little children whom they’ve only seen once in their life many a time.
And my rich children of human and who does what he does only on earth; for this she is but miles long, between space and space; one remembers nothing, only asks, and each one goes astray like a little travelling shadow.
I was there myself, and had made hundreds of thousand miles in a thousand and thousands of miles, only the sleigh was left and the shod ate across. I had no money to give, but whilst I stopped at a revolving convent of South America, I cried tears that rang Musical. If you will also give my theme a thorough fare-red stripe through, nothing but copper, I can’t do it.
And now little Mary drives about at Warm World ever since that time when we children told the Snowman to dance.