AdamH

Is snow that falls anytime between December 1 and December 25 considered Christmas snow in the movie?

Count Dooku

What movie?

Are you talking about the half-hour TV show from 1969? That's not a bleeping movie!

OldBoy

i think urrutiap has made multiple accounts. mods?

Count Dooku

Also, to address your question, why the bleep would snow that falls in early December be "Christmas snow?" It could all melt away by mid-December!

GoldenJCJ

Maybe you’re just underestimating the extreme popularity of a 50+ year old Christmas special in the middle of August!

Count Dooku

STAY OUTTA MY TERRITORY!!!!

Jay G.

This thread could be merged with the other Frosty the Snowman thread OP created:
https://forum.dvdtalk.com/movie-talk...ted-santa.html

And "Christmas Snow" is snow that falls during the Christmas season, which is more than just Christmas Eve/Day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christ...holiday_season

Count Dooku

Nope, you're wrong. Christmas snow has to fall and stick to the ground on Christmas Day or Christmas Eve, creating a fresh covering of snow that constitutes the desired "White Christmas," popularized in story (Dickens) and song (Berlin).

Jay G.

Saying I'm wrong about a basically made up term.

Do either Dickens or the song refer to it as "Christmas snow," and specify it's the only possible Christmas snow?

story

"Christmas snow" starts when Christmas starts. That means it begins December 25 and includes any snow during the twelve days of Christmas through January 5 leading up to Epiphany on January 6, celebrating the arrival of the wise men to see baby Jesus. Any snow in the four weeks before Christmas is during the anticipatory season of Advent so it's Advent snow. Frosty the Snowman is clearly not very orthodox. I'm glad I'm here to tell us these things!

OldBoy

And the answer is...

Count Dooku

Every thing is a made-up term. Calling a round piece of baked dough with tomato sauce and cheese a "pizza" is a made-up term. It was just made up a long time ago.

Words and phrases have meanings. Those meanings are how we communicate ideas to one another.

The idea of a "white Christmas" is, essentially, a mass marketed idea of what an idealized Christmas holiday is like. A white Christmas is an idea distinct from Christmas snow. A white Christmas only requires that it has snowed previous to December 25th, and so there is a covering of snow on the ground, satisfying the false nostalgia we feel for what a "real" Christmas holiday should be like. Christmas snow is (almost literally) the falling of snow on Christmas Eve and/or Christmas Day. The premise being, though no longer true if it ever was, that there is a 36 hour period where the world comes to a stop, and so the falling of a fresh blanket of white snow symbolizes the peace and tranquility of those hours.

Think about how ridiculous it is that there is even an association of snow with Christmas. December 25th is summertime in the Southern Hemisphere, and it never snows in a lot of the Northern Hemisphere. But it is an idea that people have been sold on, at least in the US. It's a collective false nostalgia that is then used to advertise to us through an emotionally desire for joy and fulfillment, that we believe we are supposed to feel at Christmastime.

Count Dooku

The linking of Frosty to Christmas is entirely a creation of the people who made the 1969 TV special. The original song is only a winter song. There is no mention of Christmas, and at the end Frosty says, "Don't you cry I'll be back again some day."
Rankin-Bass (?) changed it to "I'll be back on Christmas Day!"
The TV show added Santa and all the references to Christmas into the mix.

Jay G.

The term "pizza" has a bit more ubiquity than "Christmas snow." One of your claimed sources, the song "White Christmas," doesn't even use the term. I'm very doubtful your claimed other source uses it either.

"Frak" was a made up swear word for the BSG reboot. The fact that some people use it outside the show now doesn't mean it wasn't made up for the show.

..different than the concept of "Christmas snow." Why do you think they're the same thing?

You do realize that Jesus Christ wasn't literally born on December 25th, right? Early Christianity co-opted the already present holiday of Winter Solstice in Europe to convert it to something Christian, much as they did with Easter. It's associated with snow because it took over a winter holiday, not because of a specific date.

Christmas celebrations have always extended past just the day itself, or some arbitrarily narrow "36 hour window." The 12 days of Christmas is an actual 12 days long. Yuletide was originally almost 2 months long, from mid November to early January:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelve_Days_of_Christmas
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yule#Germanic_paganism
When Frosty the Snowman TV special came out, the Christmas "season," when people would start preparing for it, decorating for it, playing Christmas music, etc, was pretty much established as starting right after Thanksgiving, exemplified by the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade ending with Santa. TV channels air Christmas specials in the weeks before actual Christmas Day, and Frosty the Snowman aired before Christmas. The story is clearly set in the days/weeks before Christmas, and yet no less an authority than Santa declares Frosty made of "Christmas snow," so it clearly couldn't be snow that fell on Christmas Day, his stated date of return.

Count Dooku

Replying to Jay G.

You said:
Whether a word has an etymology that goes back thousands of years or a decade, it is ultimately just something somebody made up to stand for an idea. This is a philosophical concept.

You said:
Because I said:
So those are not "sources." They are examples of how popular mass media can generate ideas and even label ideas.

The idea of a WHITE CHRISTMAS is a metaphor for a snowy Christmas.
White Christmas is one of the most popular English-language songs of the 20th Century. It is poetry that ties the feeling of nostalgia and love of family to a climatological happenstance that most of the world does not experience.
The song is an exceptional example of how mass media can put an idea out into our popular culture and have it take hold so powerfully that the truth of the idea becomes ubiquitous.
Though not described as such in the original story, think about the way Christmas Day is presented in every production of A Christmas Carol. Scrooge opens his window on a world covered in a fresh blanket of snow that had fallen during the night. His renewal of spirit is symbolized by the purity and whiteness of the snow.

You said:
Ummm . . . the "white" is snow.
And I very clearly said they were not the same thing.
You said:
I'm am not sure WTF any of that has to do with anything. The word Christmas means December 25th in just about every corner of the world where the holiday is celebrated. Go ahead find anybody that speaks English, and ask them when Christmas is. See if you get a different answer than December 25th.

You said:
As I explained, there is actually no natural reason for Christmas to be associated with snow.
You said:
Christmas season, the 12 days of Christmas, Yuletide, and whatever else you might name are all things. But they aren't Christmas. Christmas is a day, a holiday, a holy day, the day chosen to commemorate the birth of Christ.

As I have said before words stand for ideas. So I would simply ask you to imagine any scenario where someone would talk about Christmas snow, and they would NOT be talking about the idea that it snowed on Christmas Day.
They wouldn't. Calling snow that falls on December 15th or January 2nd "Christmas snow" would be ridiculous, and people would think you had a screw loose. Words stand for ideas. Christmas snow is a phrase that stands for it snowing on Christmas Day.

What you say about the Frosty TV special is correct. And as you might expect for a TV show based on a song, made for kids, about a magic snowman, it does not make any sense.
The answer to the OP's question is nothing. The phrase Christmas snow in the show is nonsense. It is meaningless.
But the phrase does have a meaning in the English language as it is understood by the general populace of the US, and that meaning has been constructed for us by the mass media of the latter half of the 20th Century.

I guess I just decided to indulge myself and spend some time today taking a very stupid subject seriously. Sometimes that can be fun. But I'm done now.

tanman

story

...I was... I was just giving a fun fact about Christmas and made a joke about the personal faith life of Frosty the Snowman... I didn't mean to--

Waitasec...

Are... are you Frosty the Snowman? I'm really sorry, I didnt mean any-- well, that isn't important, what I meant. Just know that I'm sorry, I won't bring it up again.

Jay G.

So to sum up:

• Count Dooku has nothing aside from their own personal opinion about what constitutes "Christmas snow," no external sources that agree with their interpretation, yet I'm clearly "wrong."
• Count Dooku seems obsessed about "White Christmas", even though they acknowledge that "Christmas snow" isn't the same thing, and hasn't shown the how the former can define the latter.
• Count Dooku doesn't understand how a holiday that's historically been celebrated in the winter by its participants has a "natural" association with snow. They called it "false nostalgia" via advertising people have been "sold on."
• Count Dooku insists that since Christmas is one specific day, anything with the word "Christmas" in it must refer to that specific day.

They're all ridiculous, but elaborating on the last point, by Dooku's logic, calling a decorated tree set up in early December a "Christmas tree" is a falsehood. "Christmas lights" are only those for a single day, or for 36 hours around that day, the rest of the time they're just lights. We should start calling them "Christmas season tree/lights" so as to not to be wrong and confuse people. Also, don't wish Dooku a "Merry Christmas" on anything but Christmas Day, since they'll reply "I can't have a Merry Christmas, it's not Christmas yet."