Christmas in Pennsylvania is always bitter cold...and white as virgin linen spread across the dinner table of an Amish homestead. The excessive snow is a terrible nuisance to most adults, but to children it is a playland policed by smiling snowmen with button eyes and skinny arms. In the early part of the Holiday Season, thousands of kids in hundreds of Quaker State towns and suburbs, simultaneously roll the icy lint of God's Great Quilt into legless, roly-poly men of snow. These Rubens-ian parodies stand silent vigil before each picture window blessed by a child's smile...until the first thaw of a false spring, some time in late February or March--if a big brother doesn't knock them down much sooner (usually the case). However, this story is not about all children and snowmen, nor about some children and snowmen...but about a particular snowman who, one recent winter, terrorized the good citizens of northwest Pennsylvania with bloodshed and tragedy.

By the time Timmy put the finishing touches on his snowman-- with poker chips, checkered hunting cap, two lengths of an old vacuum hose, and a Groucho Marx false nose--his L.L. Bean mittens and outer garments of recycled wool were soaking wet. And it was dusk...at which time, all over the vast state of Pennsylvania, children just like Timmy stepped into a warm kitchen and left their boots and thinsulate jumpsuits piled in a puddle by the door. Timmy, like all these other kids, ate supper and played Nintendo or Etcha-Sketch, or read the latest Fabulous Four adventure comic book, or listened to David Seville and The Chipmunks on a transparent red 33-1/3 rpm, or did his homework (unlikely); then peered out the living room window at his new snowman, before slipping into bed beneath several layers of Pennsylvania-Dutch-style comforters from J.C. Penny's. Shortly after 2 a.m., while he slept the untroubled sleep of a six-year- old boy, a red light suddenly blinked on the computer console of the control center of a nuclear reactor too near the border of the suburb in which Timmy's family lived.

It was a leak! But the reactor shut down so fast, and the problem rectified itself so quickly without human intervention, that the alarms never sounded, and the leak did not flow beyond the yellow zone of the third outer wall of lead casing. It was a brief accident of the lowest priority, and cleanup was a simple, automated process. Not even so much as one-millionth of an increase in rads was detected by the geigers; so the foreman on duty was not required to report this leak to his superiors--only log it in the calendar, then put his feet back on the console and resume snoring. But several radical ions did manage to escape into the atmosphere, and, had they just floated into the upper strata instead of being blown by a random breeze onto Timmy's snowman several blocks away, there would be nothing more to tell, and all would still be right with the world and northwest Pennsylvania.

"The more advanced a technology, the more it resembles magic," goes the famous quote (or something like that: I can't remember it verbatim, nor can I recall who said it). And this is exactly what happened. Somewhere, in the dimension that crosses the border between physics and sorcery, those several radioactive ions (completely harmless in the usual order of things) touched Timmy's snowman and, like the wand of a Fairy Godmother, brought it to life. But a most unfortunate coincidence turned this miraculous curiosity into a hideous curse, for a rabid dog happened to be pissing on the snowman when it suddenly came alive. As the snowman took its first breath, the mad canine jumped in shock, bit off a chunk of living snow, then ran away. By the time Timmy's snowman learned how to slide around (since it had no legs to walk), it was Christmas Eve... and he was now delirious with psychotic fantasies and frothing at the mouth (not particularly noticeable, as the bubbling saliva camouflaged itself quite well around a snow-encrusted mouth and face).

The nearest habitat was, of course, that occupied by the presently-slumbering Timmy and family. The rabid snowman managed to break in, and find the master bedroom. Without a moment's hesitation, he bludgeoned the parents to death with a small Edwardian night table recently purchased at an auction in downtown Philadelphia. (This was not an easy thing to do, as the snowman had no hands to speak of, just two uneven lengths of vacuum hose for arms. But he was very strong, very clever, and very mad. He was a cold S.O.B.) Timmy's sister was next. The police discovered some parts of her stuffed in the trash compacter, and other parts stuck to her bedroom wall with Crazy Glue...though her complete remains may never be found.

Timmy was awakened by his sister's screams, and had just enough time to leave a message on his pillow, with the PlayDoh he was using to create miniature snowmen: "IT'S THE snowman"... before the snowman smashed down his door and dragged Timmy from the house. (There was also evidence that the snowman tore apart the Christmas tree and destroyed all the presents around the tree, before leaving the scene of the crime.) Timmy's body was never found until April, when the snow thawed, and a Mennonite farmer was plowing up his field for the first planting. Naturally, Timmy's message made no sense to the police, until reports started coming in about a man disguised as a snowman lurking the streets at night and breaking into houses...some witnesses (with binoculars) claimed to have seen saliva frothing from the suspect's mouth, as he suddenly turned and glared in their direction. (Needless to say, many folks believing in Bigfoot and/or UFO abductions, had a field day with the media, and were the center of attention at American Legion and John Birch Society events.)

After several more families were brutally killed, in three counties across northwest Pennsylvania, the police realized they had a serial killer on their hands--now dubbed "The Rabid snowman." He was never caught, and the homicides continued, until, by March, over twenty-five families and Christmas trees (with their attendant gifts) had been wiped out. Suddenly, it was spring; the snows thawed, and the murders stopped...forever. The case of The Rabid snowman remains unsolved, as the only evidence of the suspect is circumstantial. In a vacant lot in one of the formerly-terrorized suburbs, a little girl playing hopskotch found the following items in a clump of weeds: five poker chips, a red-and-black checkered hunting cap, two long pieces of an old Kirby vacuum hose, a false nose with eyeglasses and a moustache, and one L.L. Bean mitten with a piece of orange PlayDoh stuck in the fabric. All these items, except the last, match the neighbors' description of Timmy's snowman. And, thanks to a revealing speck of PlayDoh (in the shape of an "i" or, as some investigators suggest, part of an exclamation point), the mitten was identified, beyond question, as having once belonged to our tiny Timmy.