Snow Globes

[Eliza Hodgkins 1812]

My younger cousin collected snow globes as a child. Her father would bring her back a new collectible from wherever he had traveled and she'd line them up on shelves. These were the usual cheap variety, the plastic ones with the Empire State Building you could buy at any shop lining Times Square. They weren't very interesting to look at, but I liked the idea of them.

I once owned a snow globe for about 10 minutes, from the time my mother gave me the unwrapped package at Christmas to the time the globe slipped out of my hands and shattered on the floor. It contained a scene from The Wizard of Oz. I actually really liked it (a piece of a story recreated and stuck in time), but the store no longer had that particular globe in stock so I exchanged it for Aeon Flux tapes. Not a bad trade as far as I was concerned.

Occasionally I'll come across one that I note as beautiful or charming. A little world sculpted and infinitely contained. A frozen moment in time, an object living up to its name. The idea of the snow globe was used to great effect in Sebold's The Lovely Bones, and in the zombie film Cemetery Man ("I'd give my life to be dead." - hah!), based on the novel Dellamorte Dellamore's (which I haven't read).

I came across these today, and they are miniature stories on pause. Grim and delightful.



Like a favorite horror movie Dolls, I can almost imagine that these are real people trapped by a punishing witch. There is something so otherworldly about them. Each deserves its own longer story.