This Calvin and Hobbes strip. One commenter said that Calvin would never forget those moments with his dad.

Amen to that.

My little sister and I were about seven and nine years old. There had been one of the bigger snowstorms we’d ever seen and we were set on making the biggest snowman ever and certainly the biggest one in the neighborhood. I’m pretty sure our older brother was part of it at the beginning.

This was in a neighborhood of five and seven bedroom homes in a predominantly Catholic state and we were all big-family baby boomers: we knew we had our competition close by.

We skunked’em.

Anne and I collected that snow and we rolled and rolled those balls (and I remember a small pang of regret that we were wrecking how pretty the blanket of snow had been in the yard) and after several hours’ work we did, we had the parts to the biggest snowman ever outside our parents’ bedroom window–possibly because that was slightly downhill as the front yard went. Thank you gravity.

But that ball for the middle section: it was ambitious but as we stopped and considered and even tried just a bit there was no way we were going to be able to heft that thing onto the giant bottom ball.

I’m pretty sure I ran inside to ask for help because at that age Daddy could still do anything, but it may be that he looked out the window instead. Either way, he was soon out there with us all bundled up and helping us roll the snowballs for just a bit longer. He declared it good and that it was all big enough.

Combination of, But Dad! and (ohthankyoufinallywecanstopnow).

And then he had a plan.

He disappeared for just a moment towards the shed on the other side of the house and came back with a large wooden plank, and together–it took all of us–we all rolled that middle ball right on up there. We did it!!!

It would have taken a way longer plank than anything around to get the head on that thing, so Dad lifted the smallest one. It was heavy but doable.

Scarf, carrot, eyes, the works. Classic.

Later we saw that some of the kids up the street in both directions had indeed made snowmen, and ours was indeed the biggest.

But then, we had Dad.

And hot cocoa on the stove from Mom when we came inside and stomped our feet and took off our boots on the slate entryway.