This is a post for posterity. The making of The Snowman.

As noted previously, John and I spent an afternoon in three different hardware stores seeking snowman construction materials with limited success. At one point we thought our best option might be to stack three progressively smaller planter pots together, but seemed iffy and would have gotten kind of expensive. Later that day, John poked around online and found a site that demonstrated how to make humongous papier-mâché pumpkins from large plastic garbage bags stuffed with newspaper. Inspiration.

So with a couple of  papier-mâché books from the library, we set about our work. The boys' interest was sustained for about 5-10 minutes at a time, so this turned out to be about 95% John's project. By the end even he was admitting he was getting a bit obsessive about it. But in the beginning, he did have help with the paper ripping. 

Then came the first layer of  papier-mâché  Edward painted about five or six brush strokes and then left John to his work.

We had to buy extra large drum liner garbage bags for the bottom ball then regular black Hefty and white kitchen liner bags for the middle and top.

Clearly the enthusiasm levels were not equal at this point in the project. Here the balls are simply stacked.

The next step was to  papier-mâché them together. At each step, several layers were required with time to dry in between. So it's easy to see how this project stretched through the entire month of December. A final layer of blank newsprint (left over packing paper from our move four years ago!) went over the whole thing so that the ink wouldn't show through the white paint. 

Then it was time to paint. Once again, there was great enthusiasm at the donning of the painting smocks, but each boy limited himself to about three or four brush strokes before leaving the rest to John. Through it all, my primary role was documentarian and flour and water whisker. If you ever need a batch of  papier-mâché goo, you know who to call. On second thought...

This is where things got a bit obsessive and I don't have pictures of each successive step. Creating the top hat involved  papier-mâché-ing the inside of an old stock pot, cutting the brim from a large cardboard box, attaching the two with  papier-mâché and then painting the whole thing black. But the paint we had didn't quite cove,r and when John got more it wasn't quite the same gloss, leaving an uneven finish. He was fretting over this before I reminded him, "You know, Frosty's hat rolled down the street before they put it on him so it was probably not pristine." Yes, this was the level of our pre-Christmas discourse.

The eyes were balls of aluminum foil covered in and attached with  papier-mâché.  The nose a rolled up cardboard piece. The mouth, a set of buttons. And voilà! A Christmas morning masterpiece!

John's hope was that the snowman would last at least the number of cumulative hours it took to create him, which he estimated at about 24--one full day of his life for a  papier-mâché snowman. As I write almost a month later, he is still standing and the only tragedy has been a nose amputation, which was my fault. 

One of the boys was lifting it over his head to get out and it started tipping forward. Afraid that it would smash to the ground, I put out my hand to catch it and ended up dislodging the nose. It's been taped back on, but looks a bit forlorn. There may be a nose transplant in our future. After all, Frosty himself did have "a corncob pipe and a button nose and two eyes made out of coal!"