It’s a given that you can ski, sledge, make snowballs, igloos, snow angels and that a hundred other fun activities can be had in the lovely white stuff. It’s never been recorded who holds the record for the longest name written in the snow but the average male bladder has a finite capacity for snow ink, so I reckon it was probably around the four or five letter mark. That rules out all the Algernons, Bartholomew’s and Montgomery’s who, let’s face it, are much too well bred to partake in such pastimes.

In the film industry, Foley artists use cornstarch, salt or cat litter to simulate the sound of footfall on snow. They should consider using toy mice, when the temperature falls below minus ten, snow will actually squeak when walked upon. Snow has good sound absorption properties too. Have you ever stopped and noticed the otherworldly silence in a snowscape after a fresh fall of snow? That’s because the trapped air between the individual crystalline flakes, traps sound waves and dampens vibrations. Studies concerning the acoustic properties of snow have shown that loud sounds can be used to measure snow cover permeability and depth. 

In some areas with abundant snowfall, people harvest snow and store it, surrounded by insulation in ice houses. This allows the snow to be used through the summer for refrigeration and air conditioning. This was common practice before Jacob Perkins built the worlds first refrigerator in 1834. The world snowiest city is Sapporo, Japan, with average yearly snowfall of 595cm, one assumes that sales of  Bosch refrigerators don’t do so well there.The world record for snow depth is 1182cm. It was measured on the slope of Mt Ibuki, Japan at an altitude of 1200m on February 14,1927. 

I don’t want to cause alarm but there are actually extraterrestrial snowmen. Very light snow is known to occur at high latitudes on Mars. A "snow" of hydrocarbons is also thought to occur on Titan, Saturn's moon. Nobody really knows how they arrived here but the alien snowpersons from these worlds are not thought to sport a carrot for a nose so most of us will have actually seen an ET snowman, like our own earthly version they are mute. They stand like sentinels in silence but inside they are desperately trying to communicate. “take me to your leader”. When they die, they form a puddle, evaporate and return to the skies.