It’s late one chilly winter’s eve, a young boy glances outside his window before crawling into bed, only to see that the first snow of the season is falling. Excited, he yells out to his mother and tells her the exciting news.

“It’s late, darling, you can play in the snow in the morning!” she exclaims.
“But mom, it’s my first ever snow! I can’t go to bed without playing in it!” the boy replies.
“No, it’s straight to bed with you! You have some important errands to run in the morning!”

And with a huff, the young boy climbs into his toasty warm bed. But when his mother makes her way to the kitchen, the temptation overtakes him and he slips out of bed, pulling on his winter coat and boots, grabbing his toy camera, and sneaking out of the front door.

Once in the snow, there is nothing but pure joy on the child’s face. His first ever snow!
He tilts his head back as he crunches through the snow, trying to catch some snowflakes on his tongue. As he reaches the street, he turns his attention to the dark beauty of the orange street lights illuminating the falling snow. Like a (very) amateur photographer, he raises his toy camera to his eyes and snaps a few pics.

“It looks just like in the movies,” he thinks to himself joyfully. And before he knows it, he’s spent over an hour in the snow, his bare hand freezing as he makes his way back into his warm bed – falling into a deep and happy sleep.

This tale is no fictional story. All you have to do is replace ‘young boy’ with ‘man-child’, ‘yells out to’ with ‘calls on FaceTime’, and ‘sneaking out’ with ‘walking out’, and you’ll have my own story! Yes, I was this excited when I saw my first ever snow fall. It might be true that I’ve once been in the snow before, but I had to travel miles into the mountains to have a glimpse at a very low level of snow. But this was my first time being properly inducted into the ‘snow day’ club – I had finally experienced snow near my own home!

It might not sound like much to some people, but it doesn’t often snow in South Africa. Maybe once in a blue moon, and even then, it’s often only on the mountains. Snow has never been a big part of my reality, so I must have seemed like a child to most people on that very first day of snow… especially when I made a snowman later that day…

When I awoke from my sleep, I was happy that I had gone out the night before. The falling snow had turned to rain and much of the snow on the ground was now like a slushpuppy. But that’s not to say that I was deterred from playing in the snow.

After running some errands in Shibuya that morning, I made my way to Yoyogi Park, taking plenty of photos on the way… I was fascinated by this stuff called ‘snow’ and I desperately wanted to make my first ever snowman.

Sunset at Yoyogi Park

Yoyogi National Stadium

When I arrived in the park, I spotted another snowman that had obviously been built earlier that day, as dusk was now falling. I decided then and there to make this snowman a buddy and build my own one close to it. However, the task was not as easy as I had thought…

When I had imagined building snowmen, I had thought that it would be like building sandcastles at the beach. I pictured the snow having the same consistency as wet sand and that it would be easy to mold. But I was wrong, this snow was a little bit hard and tough to mold, so when I stood back from my first attempt, I realised that I had made something resembling a penis:

So I quickly tried again, before any other park visitors noticed my terrible first attempt. And soon enough I had the (deformed) shape of a snowman. The only difficult part – as night was falling heavily now – was finding sticks and stones for the arms and face. I found some mismatched stones and sticks and quickly put them onto the snowman before capturing a selfie with my beautiful ‘Bob’:

Once completing my masterpiece, I made my way back home, stopping only to get a piping hot cup of coffee from Starbucks to help warm me up after getting so cold and wet from the freezing snow. All in all, nothing beats feeling like a child again – even if it’s only for a day.

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