Jack Frost

Posted by Michael Shaw in Visit | 6 comments

“Enough with all this self-expressive writing in the Skippack blog,” said a friend and trusted advisor, wiser than me in the ways of the world and in the ways of website analytics, the science of what draws people to websites, such as the one you are reading now. “Does every post have to be about YOU?” he asks. “Think about the users who visit your blog. What do THEY want? They don’t want to read about your personal issues and spiritual struggles. They want quick information about events in Skippack.”

With the slightest quiver of my typing fingers, I concede to the demands of the brave new digital age. An estimated 99% of people who visit this blog want the quick facts on the events, restaurants, and shops in my beloved Skippack Village. So such you will find below, dear reader, straightforward and direct, without the aimless poetic rambling to which I am prone.

Jack Frost Friday in Skippack

On this upcoming Friday, December 2, visit participating shops and collect snowflakes to win a giant gift basket worth $500. Shops participating in Jack Frost Friday include Floral & Hardy, Sharp Unique Gifts for Men, Justin’s Carriage House, Merle Norman Cosmetics, Green Wolf’s Village Barn Shoppe, Heart’s Desire, The Copper Partridge, and Art by Heart Gallery and Studio.

Jack Frost Friday will also feature:

• Open house in the East Village of Skippack
• Lite fare and holiday libations, as participating shops welcome you to celebrate the holidays
• Frosty the Snowman, who will visit Cooper Partridge and welcome children with snowball candy
• The candles and lights of Skippack Village, as part of Illuminaire Nights.

For more info, call 610.584.0797 or 484.991.8173.

Who is Jack Frost?

Dear reader, if you are a member of the 99% who visit I Love Skippack for quick information, we are done. Class is dismissed. I have fulfilled my obligation and provided what you seek. May you be blessed in all your comings and goings. Please come back again soon.

However, dear reader, if you happen to be a member of the one percent who read the full post, please stay for a moment longer. There are so many thoughts in my head and feelings in my soul that I want to express to you, my friend. May I call you my friend?

The name of the upcoming Skippack Event provokes a question: Who is Jack Frost? He is not, I suspect, an expert in website analytics and search engine optimization. I did a Google search (what else?) and looked in Wikipedia (where else?), and found out that:

Jack Frost is a sprite and the personification of crisp, cold, winter weather, a variant of Old Man Winter. His roots may be in Anglo-Saxon and Norse winter customs. In Viking lore, he is known as Jokul Frosti (icicle frost). He is traditionally thought to leave the frosty, fernlike crystal patterns on windows on cold mornings (window frost or fern frost), and nip the extremities in cold weather.

Through the magic of the Internet (please forgive the unscientific term), I found something even more wonderful, a poem titled Jack Frost, written by Thomas Nicoll Hepburn, a Scottish poet and author who wrote under the pen name ‘Gabriel Setoun’ and lived from 1861 to 1930. Lingering over this poem brought me back to a time, now long ago, when people cared about the ability of words to inspire the soul rather than the ability of keywords to attract users to a website.

The door was shut, as doors should be,
Before you went to bed last night;
Yet Jack Frost has got in, you see,
And left your window silver white.

He must have waited till you slept;
And not a single word he spoke,
But pencilled o’er the panes and crept
Away again before you woke.

And now you cannot see the hills
Nor fields that stretch beyond the lane;
But there are fairer things than these
His fingers traced on every pane.

Rocks and castles towering high;
Hills and dales, and streams and fields;
And knights in armor riding by,
With nodding plumes and shining shields.

And here are little boats, and there
Big ships with sails spread to the breeze;
And yonder, palm trees waving fair
On islands set in silver seas,

And butterflies with gauzy wings;
And herds of cows and flocks of sheep;
And fruit and flowers and all the things
You see when you are sound asleep.

For, creeping softly underneath
The door when all the lights are out,
Jack Frost takes every breath you breathe,
And knows the things you think about.

He paints them on the window-pane
In fairy lines with frozen steam;
And when you wake you see again
The lovely things you saw in dream.

Back to Skippack

My life, these days, dear reader, seems to be all computer screens, content management systems, and website analytics. But soon, dear reader, soon, I will go into my library and linger over beautiful words in beautiful leather and cloth-bound books, returning to the love of my youth. And I will always provide you with information about the events, restaurants and shops in Skippack Village. But I will also try hard to write a few beautiful words about my beautiful town and sneak them into my blog. Why? Because this is who I am, this is the way God made me.