Variously described as ‘wearing a cloak of silver’ and looking like ‘a hoary old man’, Jack Frost has attracted many artistic depictions over the centuries — some more positive than others.
When sunrise reveals a landscape dusted in sparkling white, you know you’ve had a visit from Jack Frost. However, from an identity parade of possibilities, it can be hard to imagine the culprit in person. The poet John P. Smeeton describes Jack Frost as wearing ‘a cloak of silver’ and ‘shoes of sun-beam light’, yet the children’s book illustrator Albert Edward Jackson has him in a Father Christmas-style suit, brush in hand, painting the trees as white as his beard. Could the real Jack Frost please stand up?
For 19th-century cartoonist Thomas Nast, he is ‘a hoary old man’ bringing a cold snap that strikes terror in the poor, whereas poet Cecily E. Pike depicts him as a ‘gay little sprite’ who would laugh, ‘Ho! Ho! Ho! What fun I have had in the night!’ He is, above all, a mischievous fellow, writes Gabriel Setoun: ‘He must have waited till you slept/And not a single word he spoke/But pencilled o’er the panes and crept/Away again before you woke.’
Depictions of Jack Frost might vary, but all evoke the wonder of the mysterious crystalline carpet that appears overnight on our lawns and sugarcoats our trees and shrubs. This glittery covering is simply ice crystals formed by water vapour coming into contact with a surface that’s below freezing, but its sudden arrival can feel otherworldly and curious legends have been attached to it.
Some believe that Jack Frost may originate from a character, also called Father Frost, in the Russian fairy tale Morozko. He rescues a young girl abandoned by her wicked stepmother and cuts a benign, elderly figure with a cloak and a long, soft beard. Others look to Norse mythology, where fantastical frost giants roam an icy realm and Kari, a wind god, sires sons named Jokul and Frosti.
In other folklore, Frost is closely connected with autumn. In a 1922 drawing by American cartoonist John T. McCutcheon, he perches on a maple branch painting autumn leaves with a palette of warm shades. It’s a depiction that echoes Birdie and his Fairy Friends (1889), by Margaret Canby. In ‘The Frost Fairies’ chapter, set in ‘a cold country far to the North’, the clumsy fairies spill colourful jewels belonging to the king, Jack Frost, all over the trees. An initially angry Frost is soon taken with the effect and determines, once a year, to paint the trees ‘with the brightest layer of gold and rubies’.
Often, this personification of cold weather is someone to fear. ‘Look out! Look out! Jack Frost is about! He’s after our fingers and toes,’ begins Pike in her poem Jack Frost, but she softens to him on account of his ‘wonderful pictures’. English illustrator Arthur Rackham is less ambivalent, depicting him as an airborne elf terrorising villagers. Even Nat King Cole’s The Christmas Song has him ‘nipping at your nose’.
It’s unsurprising that Jack Frost would incite fear. ‘If you’re not expecting it and a frost comes sweeping down and kills everything in its wake, then it can be devastating,’ says ecologist and botanist Becky Searle, an expert in science-based gardening. The reason an early frost is so disastrous is because it ‘gets inside the water in the leaves, fruit or petals and bursts the cells open,’ she explains, adding that frost-bitten plants are ‘literally exploding from the inside out’.
Farmers and gardeners are, of course, wise to this, protecting tender plants. In times past, however, an unexpected frost meant you’d have to make do with hardy plants such as kale and cabbage, which have a protective layer that can withstand frost and, says Miss Searle, ‘a sort of in-built antifreeze in the cells of their leaves’.
Whether we feel favourably towards Jack Frost or not, his visits are usually short and his white calling card is erased by daylight’s warmth. It’s this fleeting quality to frost that poet Helen Bayley Davis conveys so well:
Someone painted pictures on my
Windowpane last night—
Willow trees with trailing boughs
And flowers, frosty white,
And lovely crystal butterflies;
But when the morning sun
Touched them with its golden beams,
They vanished one by one!
Deborah Nicholls-Lee is a writer whose work has been published by the BBC, The Guardian, Sussex Life and The Times, as well as Country Life.
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