"Mother, look! What's all that white stuff?"
"For it was the first snow of the season. And as any child can tell you, there's a certain magic that comes with the very first snow."
— The Narrator, Frosty the Snowman
When water evaporates it turns into water vapor, and when it condenses it becomes rain. But if the right conditions are met, with the biggest factor being the temperature, it can turn into something magical.
White petals of rain falling gently from the sky. Snow.
When a character experiences snow for the first time they may feel joy and wonder, or in some occasions, fear.
A Snowball Fight is a common way of showing they have gotten used to snow.
When it lasts all winter, see Dreaming of a White Christmas. When it's totally out of the ordinary, see Let There Be Snow. See also First Time in the Sun, which may coincide.
Examples:
open/close all folders
Anime & Manga
- I Want Your Mother To Be With Me!: In Chapter 18, Haruka is excited to see her first heavy snow (presumably she used to live somewhere warmer than Niigata, where the manga takes place).
- A Touhou Project manga (put in video here
) about Flandre's first Christmas celebration. It's adorable.
- It's important to know Flandre is permanently kept inside her room for fear of having her destroy something.
- Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou: The area around Café Alpha is buried in a heavy snowfall in ch. 91, which thrills Alpha when she discovers it. After delighting in the scenery, she makes a snowman, and puts some snowballs in her freezer for later.
Comic Books
Fan Works
- In Eye Of The Fox Kira reveals he has no idea what snow is when he sees it outside his window and flatly replies that it never snowed in Fire Country and that he spent four years in a coma when Naruto/Rad calls him out on this. He quickly comes to dislike the cold, though.
- In What's In A Name, Reiner Schnee fondly remembers his daughter's First Snow because it was the first time she said 'Papa'.
- In Snow Angel, Maria and Shadow have lived in a space colony their entire life. When they arrive on Earth for the first time, they arrive during a snowy winter.
- The Flower That Arches With The Sun, the sequel to The Flower That Follows The Sun, has a short arc where Youka experiences her first snowfall. Yuuka has to explain to her that no, it's not just shaved ice strewn everywhere.
- Little Hands, Big Attitude: Silver and Blaze, coming from a world where a volcano burned down everything, initially mistake snow for ash and are baffled that Allison isn't panicking. Allison has to explain that it's frozen water, which confuses Blaze even further because she can't match what she knows about ice to what she's seeing.
Films — Animation
- Bambi provides the page image/caption.
- In Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, Manny and Ellie's baby Peaches sees snow pretty soon after her birth. Well, it IS the ice age, after all!
- The Land Before Time VIII: The Big Freeze
- "What's this? What's this? There's white things in the air!"
Films — Live-Action
- In The Fountain, the wife asking to go for a walk in the First Snow is the Bookend of the film.
- Played for Laughs in Cool Runnings, about the first ever Jamaican bobsled team at the Winter Olympics. The four young men have never experienced winter before, and are stunned speechless as soon as they arrive in Calgary during a blizzard. This is contrasted with their coach, an American former bobsledder who's much fatter than his team and nowhere near as affected by the cold.
- Wonder Woman (2017): Because she's lived on Themyscira her whole life, Diana's never seen snow. She experiences it after Veld is freed. It stands out vividly when some falls on Diana's long dark brunette hair, and she goes to catch some on her tongue when Steve reassures her that it's benign.
Literature
- In How The Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, Yolanda and her family moved to New York City from the Dominican Republic in the 60's. When she sees snow for the first time, she thinks it's fallout from a nuclear bomb.
- Snow Lion, By David Mc Phail.
- In The Giver, Jonas is very confused upon seeing snow for the first time (because he's used to total climate control).
- In To Kill a Mockingbird, Scout's amusing reaction to seeing snow for the first time in Alabama is thinking it's the end of the world.
- Warrior Cats:
- In Fire And Ice, Fireheart is amazed because he hasn't seen it before; he was shut inside as a kitten when still living with humans. He quickly learns that snow makes it difficult to move around, however.
- In The Darkest Hour, Fireheart is out with his apprentice Bramblepaw when it begins to snow. Bramblepaw chases the snowflakes gleefuly, and Fireheart wonders whether Bramblepaw's evil father Tigerstar ever played with snowflakes.
- Even Yellowfang experiences her first snow in Yellowfang's Secret and actually dislikes it. She believes that the snow keeps her already-long fur waterlogged and heavy.
- Twilight's Bella Swan first experiences snow shortly after she moves to Forks with her father. Her first thought? "Eww."
- Drizzt from the Forgotten Realms novels didn't even know what snow was, being a subterranean-born dark elf. He initially found it beautiful, but quickly caught on that it could pose a problem for wilderness survival when he realized the white stuff falling from above was covering the ground and wasn't going away.
- In A Song of Ice and Fire, by the end of A Dance With Dragons, snow is starting to fall in the South - heralding the beginning of a winter predicted to be years long, and everyone is terrified because the situation is so dire from the wars.
- Inverted in the Ciaphas Cain series: Valhallans hail from an iceworld, and are generally quite inexperienced with rain. As Guardsmen almost never get to return to their homeworlds, they absolutely adore snowy conditions - while Cain, who grew up in a climate-controlled hive world of unknown identity, pulls his greatcoat tighter and wonders how he pissed off the Emperor this time.
- Buck from The Call of the Wild is a dog from sunny California, so it surprises him when he sees snow for the first time when he comes to the Yukon. He starts trying to taste the fallen snow and trying to catch it when the humans laugh at the sight of him, making him feel ashamed.
- The Lotterys More or Less: Luiz, the Lottery family's guest in this book, is from Brazil, where it never snows. As such, when Luiz sees snow for the first time in Toronto, even though it's very faint, he's so excited he runs out of the house to go experience it in flip-flops.
Live Action TV
- In the 3rd Rock from the Sun episode "Frozen Dick", the Solomons experience snow for the first time. Harry mistakes it for "albino brain chiggers". Dick and Sally have similar reactions.
Music
- "The First Snowfall", first recorded in the '50s by Bing Crosby (and later covered by the Carpenters).
Oh, the first snowfall of the winter
Was a day that we all waited for... - "Song of the Evergreens" by Chicago sings of anticipation for the coming snows of winter.
Video Games
- In The Sims 2: Seasons, any player-controlled sim upon seeing snow for the first time will get a memory about it ("Saw First Snow").
- Märchen Forest: Mylne and the Forest Gift: Mylne's never seen snow before, what with living in a warm forest all her life.
- In RealMyst, Atrus' notes on Rime reveal he'd never encountered such a cold Age before it, and had to come up with new devices to cope with its unfamiliar weather conditions.
Web Animation
- If the Emperor Had a Text-to-Speech Device has this in the Sanguinala special... while Boy and Rogal Dorn are walking through the Imperial Palace.
Boy: dadornable? what's that stuff falling from the sky?
Rogal Dorn: It is snow, Boy. Likely due to a malfunctioning cooling system in the Palace. Which I will be fixing later.
Webcomics
- In Mew and Mewtwo Huey's first experience with snow had Mewtwo brutally throw him face-first into the snow, expecting him to realize that it's not that magical. Huey says "Magic snow!" anyway as Newtwo angrily tackles Mewtwo.
- In Tales of the Questor, Quentyn goes from freaked out to "Kid On Christmas Morning" excited when he experiences his first snowfall (His homeland is too temperate for snow).
- In Misfile, Rumisiel experiences snowfall (from below the cloud line) for the first time while staying in Tempest.
- In The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob!, artificial creature Molly is delighted at her first snowfall. She promptly runs outside to play in it and make fully-functioning steam-powered robots out of it.
Web Original
- Australians See Snow For The First Time: A BuzzFeed video where the website sent a few people from their Australian office to the United States to experience their first snowy winter. The lone girl in the group even admitted that she only owned a single pair of full pants because it's never cold where she lives.
Western Animation
- One Dragon Tales episode had Sixth Ranger Enrique (who grew up in tropical Latin America) excited to see snow for the first time.
- In the Avalon Tour story arch for Gargoyles Angela comments on how breathtaking snow and ice are when they land in Norway, having lived her whole life on an island where it was always summer. Gargoyle, it seems, have a higher tolerance for low temperatures than humans.
- Jimmy Two-Shoes: In the Season 1 episode "A Cold Day in Miseryville", Heloise builds a Weather-Control Machine to bring a winter wonderland to Miseryville after Jimmy tells her and Beezy about snow. Lucius is unsure about how to respond to this new phenomenon's effects on the town and its denizens until he realizes the cold weather can also make people miserable.
- One episode in Spongebob Squarepants is about a glacier moving over Bikini Bottom, causing it to snow. All other hijinks aside, Plankton tries to use the power of the water crystals to rule the world, only to be completely covered in it.
- The 1998 UK special The First Snow of Winter, about a duckling who fails to fly south and experiences snow for the first time.
- In the Tangled: The Series special "Queen For a Day", Rapunzel experiences an unexpected snowfall and enjoys it; she then declares a snow day for all the kingdom residents. It suddenly all goes downhill when the snow turns out to be part of a curse bestowed upon by the evil Zhan Tiri, which results in a blizzard once Corona is at its weakest and will destroy anything in its path.
- Timothy Goes to School has an installment, "The Big Snowfall," in which Lilly experiences the joys of her first snow day, having moved from a climate where it was warm and never snowed.
- Super Noobs: The episode "Let it Noob, Let it Noob, Let it Noob" has aliens Memnock and Zenblock experience snow for then first time in their lives as their home planet never has snowfall. They freak out over it, prompting the Noobs to help Memnock and Zenblock get used to the snow by having them engage in a snowball fight with each other.
- In an episode of The Lion Guard, Kion and the Lion Guard escort two goofy gorilla brothers to their mountain home, which is completely covered in snow and ice. Being African animals of the savanna, they're at first amazed at the snow and what it is before they actually enjoy it.
- In Yogi's First Christmas, snow is among the things that are new to the normally-hibernating Yogi and Boo-Boo.
- Pinocchio's Christmas from Rankin/Bass Productions is about the title character celebrating his first Christmas and it opens with Pinocchio seeing snow for the first time.
Real Life
- When the Philadelphia Flyers' mascot Gritty saw snow for the first time during his inaugural season, he tweeted "Zamboni dust! IT'S FALLING FROM THE SKY."
- UK documentary miniseries Return of the Tribe from 2007 followed a group of Papua New Guinean tribespeople visiting the United Kingdom for the first time, including one bit of them experiencing their first snowfall. Their first reaction? Surprisingly quiet confusion.
