Why do snowmen wear hats and have carrot noses?

A snowman is a curious dresser. It stands outside in freezing weather, wearing a scarf it cannot feel and a hat it has no real use for. Then someone gives it a nose from the vegetable drawer.

The outfit is so familiar that we rarely question it. But the hat and carrot have slightly different stories.

Dressing snowmen has long been a way to use clothes people already own. Old hats and scarves turn a figure made of snow into something that looks like a neighbor, or perhaps a member of the family. In her history of American snowmen for PBS, Gene Tempest describes how their clothing has reflected the castoffs in people's closets. A snowman's wardrobe can tell you something about the people who built it.

That also helps explain the appeal of a hat. Put a woolly cap on a snowman and it looks ready for a snowy afternoon. Give it a tall black hat and it looks unexpectedly formal, considering it has sticks for arms.

Frosty gave the hat a particularly memorable role. In the 1950 song, a magical hat brings him to life. The artwork accompanying the recording showed him wearing a black hat, and the 1969 television special carried the character to another generation. There is a detail that's easy to forget, though: the original song describes Frosty with a button nose.

So where does the carrot fit in?

It was already part of snowman imagery before Frosty. The 1944 children's book Snowy the Traveling Snow Man featured a snowman with a carrot nose. That gives us an earlier example, but it doesn't identify who first tried the idea or exactly when it became a tradition.

As a building choice, a carrot makes practical sense. Its pointed shape is easy to push into packed snow, and the wider end gives the face a nose that sticks out. Orange also shows up clearly against white. These are useful qualities, although they don't prove how the custom began.

The result is pleasantly silly. A carrot would look ridiculous on a human face, yet it seems perfectly reasonable on a snowman. Make it a little too long or tilt it upward, and the whole expression changes.

The snowmen inside our Christmas globes use this classic design too, complete with hats and carrot noses. You can add them to your Christmas decorations even if the weather never gives you enough snow to build one outdoors.