As a kid, I pretty much was willing to watch any animated Christmas special that was airing, but there was one special that especially caught my eye and is probably still my very favorite Christmas special even to this day. The special that I'm referring to is Frosty the Snowman.

Probably because of my love for Frosty the Snowman, I got it into my mind one year that it would be really cool to build my very own snowman. When I brought the subject up to my family, my grandfather immediately volunteered to help me build one the next time that it snowed. I remember looking forward to the idea of building our snowman a lot, but sadly, it was not meant to be. My grandfather passed away before the first snow of the season that year.

My grandfather and I had had quite a strong bond, so this was quite a blow to me for reasons other than the fact that we would never get the opportunity to build that snowman together. You see, I've always been a pretty quiet person, but my grandfather is one of the few people who I often had meaningful and lengthy conversations with. The two of us talked about every subject you could imagine, from discussing lighthearted subjects like who our favorite cartoon characters were to discussing heavier topics like what the word 'cremation' means and how neither of us wanted to end up that way. My grandmother has actually said that my grandfather had never even discussed his desire not to be cremated before and that she wouldn't have had him buried if he hadn't mentioned that the idea that being cremated didn't appeal to him when discussing the subject with me. Like me, my grandfather was not much of a talker, to the point that he probably neglected to have some conversations that he should have had.

I could go on further about my grandfather, but I think it would be better to get back to the main topic of this article - the snowman. I did end up building a snowman that year despite the fact that my grandfather passed away too soon for the two of us to do it together. My mom ended up helping me do it, and it came out looking less like the snowmen I'd seen on TV and more like a big pile of snow with a smaller pile of snow placed on top of it. It may not have come out as I had imagined, but I was and still am appreciative of the fact that my mom made that memory of building a snowman of my very own happen for me.