Snowmen: The Brussels “Miracle of 1511”

City residents expressed themselves with more than 100 figures sculpted from snow

Illustrations from 1870 edition of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snowman” (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Starting with Gene Autry’s recording of the song “Frosty the Snowman” in 1950, Frosty developed into a pervasive symbol of snowmen in America. Snowmen, though, have a much longer and more noteworthy history.

According to Bob Eckstein, author of The History of the Snowman, the first image of a snowman appears in marginalia in a 1380 manuscript now in the Royal Library of the Netherlands. He says early European snowmen were much more political, “a way for people to say something against their church, or maybe their local politician.” A primary example is the Miracle of 1511 in Brussels.

West-central Europe struggled during the winter of 1510–11, with snow and below-freezing temperatures beginning in mid-November. In some areas, temperatures never got above freezing until a brief mid-February warm-up. Residents of Brussels would even call it the Winter of Death. Starting in January, though, snowmen flourished throughout the city, built by and expressing the views of all levels of its society.

Then part of the Duchy of Brabant in the Habsburg Netherlands, Brussels was governed by aristocrats. One member of each of seven noble families made up the upper council of the…