Ironically, one of the Christmas carols I remember well but forget to sing contains this refrain: “Snow was falling, snow on snow … In the bleak midwinter, long, long ago.”

I’ve been humming the melody this week – over and over in automatic rewind – as the snow continued to fall on the woodlands surrounding the house, coating tree branches and shrubs with a layer of white as light as meringue.

Midwinter, yes, but the world is anything but bleak.

“Announced by all the trumpets of the sky,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson, “arrives the snow, and driving o’er the fields, seems nowhere to alight; the whited air hides hills and woods, the river, and the heaven, and veils the farmhouse at the garden’s end.”

Last Saturday the whited air did indeed hide and veil everything in its icy breath. Fence posts and rock wall, shore and path, road and rooftop, all were covered with a foot of snow. Silently, softly, the snowflakes clung to cedars and alders alike.

No wind disturbed the display. It was as if the magical Snow Makers from the paintings of Nelly Littlehale Umbstaetter created the scene by using a giant sifter from which the frosty confection fell into every crevice or corner. Similar to shaking powdered sugar on cookies, and – to me – just as sweet.

In my mind, I became another image out of the books of my childhood: Hans Christian Andersen’s beloved Snow Queen. “A few snowflakes were falling outside, and one of these, the biggest of them all, remained lying on the edge of one of the flower boxes. The snowflake grew larger and larger, till at last it became the figure of a woman dressed in the most delicate white gauze, which was made up of millions of tiny star-shaped flakes.”

A queen with a domain spectacular. By Sunday morning’s dawn, a few pink clouds scudded over the blue waters of the bay, and one-by-one snow-laden trees were spotlighted by rays of sunshine until the whole white world was equally lighted. The sky shown in two tones of blue: bright, electric blue where sea gulls were gliding; and deeper, royal blue above the clouds, which the sun had bleached from pink to white.

Temperatures climbed, and snow on the roof slopes began dripping until long icicles lined the eaves like strands of Christmas lights wrapped around gutters. Occasionally, the silence was broken by the ping of icicles hitting the side of the house before breaking into the snow bank and scaring off the chickadees.

Much later, with the wind still and the outside hushed, the moon shone on field and forest, and the white of day became even brighter by night. From every window, the view was breathtaking: mounds of snow on the deck, snow-covered limbs bent into archways, the birdbath standing like a draped mummy. Every branch was flocked with wondrous white.

The Snow Queen’s “walls of the palace were built of drifting snow … The rooms were all lit by the Northern Lights.”

Hans Christian Andersen said so. And I know so.