The Author and the Snowman

The writing of Christmas in Idaho

I was quite aware that Christmas was only weeks away as I sat looking out my kitchen window.

The first snows were falling and the surrounding woods began to take on the white mantle of winter. I found myself sitting, pencil in hand, sketching on a bit of white note paper. Unusual for me, since for decades I had inhabited the virtual world of 3D computer graphics. This was a world of computers, geometries, fractals, animation curves and pressing deadlines. 

Whether it was the snow falling on that afternoon or a nostalgic yearning for the Christmas of my youth, two hours later a snowman stared back at me from the page. He looked lost, with a sad smile, and there seemed to be a story behind those eyes. But whose story was it?, I wondered.

Years would pass without a single word being committed to paper, but all that time that snowman lived somewhere deep inside me.

He would have stayed there had it not been for a pause in the endless stream of animation and illustration deadlines. It was my studio manager who, sick of my pacing and waiting for the next project, made a suggestion, “Take a couple of days off and write that Christmas book you’ve been talking about for years.” And that’s how it started. The latent story rolled out onto the paper as if I were watching an animation. As the snowman’s adventures unfolded before me, I laughed, I wept and I wondered. Finally, I came to realize whose story this was.

From that point on, I knew what I had to do and I knew why this snowman had come to me.

All those years of studying classical drawing and painting. All those years of collecting works by the great illustrators of the past. All those treasured Christmas feelings and the anguish that Christmas has been slipping away. All of it would now come together in a new Christmas book. A book I could share with everyone who feels, as I do, that we need to find Christmas again. A book that would speak up for that silent night, two thousand years ago, that has been shouted down. 

I wouldn’t say that the process was an easy one, but what I do know is that the snowman led the way.

He felt the sadness, the fear, the cold. All I had to do was put myself in his snow feet and write his story. And write I did, not always realizing where we were going, but with the sense that once we started the journey, there was no turning back. One adventure led to another and at one point we both knew we were approaching the end of the story. Let me just say that, as the last few pages were being written, we were both surprised and we both had tears rolling down our cheeks. 

With the story finished, it was back to the real world and onto the next step.

I wanted the story to reside inside something special, to become a Christmas tradition, a keepsake, to be opened and visited each year to make the holiday new again. That was easier said than done.

While my commercial art experience had equipped me well to design and illustrate books, the endless series of steps to create a keepsake quality book was daunting. Illustrations, gilding, page design, quality paper, expert printing — I wanted them all. I’ve always loved books and I remember what they used to feel like. The look, the touch, and the smell of a printed volume was something singular. I was determined to bring back that experience within a classic illustrated Christmas book.  

All in all, a full ten years have passed since I sat in my kitchen and sketched a snowman I came to call Idaho.

And now, as I sit on that same chair by that same kitchen window, a book rests on the table in front of me. I feel the glow of Christmas inside me as I recall the love that went into its creation. I am gladdened by the thought that there is Christmas between its covers.

— by Ray Downing