My Favourite Christmas Story: James Field on Tove Jansson's "Snow"

James Field writes:

Snow by Tove Jansson is a very pretty story. It is simple, almost nothing: a little girl spends winter with her mother in a country house that belongs to somebody else. The mother, inattentive to her daughter’s moods, finds it easy to relax and work while the little girl sits pensively by the window, watching grey snow pile higher. She expects to be buried there, amongst another family’s furniture and clothing. Frightened, she awaits the inevitable.

The house is a summer home, made for another family and another season. It feels wrong to be there in winter and the girl loses her bearings. “It should be winter in town and summer in the country. Everything was topsy-turvy.” The girl in Snow seems especially vulnerable to the despondency of winter; she tries to follow individual snowflakes with her eyes as they fall, but the swirling infinity of flakes induces something like panic in her. The countlessness of falling snow is a thought too big to handle. As she explores the house she finds strings of dormant rooms to be unbearably sad, “like a train ready to leave, with its lights shining over the platform.”

In summer it is easy to nostalgically hold childhood at arm’s length, but in winter it isn’t so simple. Jansson expertly draws out the darkness of childhood, fear of the imaginary, denial of unreality. For the girl, her snow-wrapped winter home takes on some of the characteristics of Hill House, populated by creeping unseen people, lit  by miserly lamps, full of whispering, rustling, groaning. Her mother makes ink drawings at the table and is oblivious to her daughter’s discomfort. “'Shall we have a story?’ she asked, and went on drawing.”

Snow is a good companion for The Wish by Roald Dahl. In both stories children revel in their ability to conjure fear, but then struggle to control it. The girl in Snow is almost swept away as she imagines the weight of falling snow causing the whole earth to lose its balance, turn quietly and shed its surface things. (In The Wish, a boy traps himself in a game of The Floor is Lava, so as a warming counterpoint to Snow it might help take the chill from your reading-bones.)

Contrariness is not often embraced in fiction; writers mistakenly think a ‘real’ character is one who can explain away every urge. Not Jansson. When the house is finally buried completely by snow, the girl, unexpectedly, is delighted. “The menacing snow had buried us in its warmth for ever and we didn’t have to worry a bit about what went on there outside.” Jansson’s evocation of childhood and its contradictory, complementary fears and joys is almost uncanny. It is a memory, perhaps, and seen through an adult lens, but seems impossibly, irresistibly real. Snow leaves you wanting to be buried, leaves you terrified of it, to be buried for a week maybe, to be buried for ever.

You can read Snow at this link: http://lolagirl4.blogspot.co.uk/2011/02/snow-by-tove-jansson.html

About the author:

James Field is the editor of a children’s literary journal, Lamplands. He currently finds himself in London where he is reconciliatory. His typing speed is 65 wpm, he has 27 Steam achievement points, andhe has recently become comfortable with swearing around his family.

Stories written: "The Mushroom Hunters" (read by Clareine Cronin)