Come Make Friends with Frost

When the temperature drops and the trees lose their leaves, it can be tough to find the motivation to set foot outdoors. Songbirds don’t sing, plants sleep beneath their blanket of snow and will stay that way until their first breath of spring thaw. It’s easy to see only white and grey. It’s easy to shield against a bitter chill and shut out the outdoors… but is that really the best way to spend the season?

This winter, we’re encouraging a different approach to the snow and ice. There are ways to find brightness and beauty and warmth, if you know how to look. There is color in the snow—it reflects from the sky. There are soft pinks and blues, even delicate lilac colors, catching each crystalline flake and refracting it back to the pupil with spectacular effect.

Daybreak is the best time to catch this magic, while the rest of the world is still asleep. It’s not a secret: photographers have called it, “the magic hour.” And it’s easy to understand why. This is the time when the imagination runs wild. Dark branches coated in a smooth shell of frozen water look like they’re producing their own light as they glow in the pink sun that slants over the landscape. Everything is so quiet and still that even the most subtle movement can catch our attention—our senses are heightened and nature seems more real.

There is perfection here as pieces of snow fall from the trees and bury themselves in the soft, white carpet below.

This is winter.

Of all the seasons, winter is the one we’d most like to ignore, to wish it away into oblivion as something that needs to be tolerated and withstood for the duration until spring creeps in with its pastel colors of those first delicate tulip buds… but what if we didn’t have to grin and bear it? What if we could find some of that same joy we find in spring’s arrival throughout the winter as well?

This year’s Frost collection is all about putting a new spin on winter. It’s an opportunity to imagine an ice garden, borrowing geometrics from glacial formations and faceted crystals and lending them to planters, wind chimes, and fountains. It’s about braving the weather with a payoff of absolute clean and calm and beauty, or inviting these cold ideas inside the home that normally stays so dark during the winter months.

Hexagons and octagons are efficient shapes, easily stood and stacked, making way for open spaces inside what might become an ice palace. Linear structure lends itself to the science of snow, calling out that moment of inspecting the perfect snowflake specimen before it dissolves into a drop of ordinary water in the warmth of a fingertip. We can be inspired by the seemingly barren landscape of winter, all the while remembering what lies beneath that fluffy white blanket: life!

We can honor life, fresh and green, by protecting it inside a little glass shell. Like a sample on a space station, preserving life from Earth. But there is adventure in the starkness that lies outside a terrarium. And it’s all coated in sparkling frost.