Apologies for missing the Advent Calendar entry for yesterday. But just like a real calendar, you can always go back and open the one you missed…

Jack

As in, what I posted yesterday.

Also, as in Frost. Jack Frost makes a few popular appearances this time of year. “Nipping at your nose,” for example, in The Christmas Song. Or in the Rankin-Bass animated movie named after him. Or in the second Frosty the Snowman animated movie.

Jack Frost apparently has its roots in Viking Lore, his name originally being Jokul Frosti  or “icicle frost”. He’s something of a trickster character, nipping at noses and toes, and leaving patterns in ice on people’s windows. For me he calls to mind Puck, famously of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, perhaps with Old Man Winter as his Oberon? I can see them walking through snowy fields, perhaps making plans to seduce the Snow Queen. A Midwinter Night’s dream.

The lunatic, the lover, and the poet
Are of imagination all compact.
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,
That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt:
The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
Such tricks hath strong imagination,
That if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy;
Or in the night, imagining some fear,
How easy is a bush supposed a bear! – Theseus from A Midsummer Night’s Dream