Jack Skellington and snowflakes on an arm

The snow came in sideways on the feast of St Thomas, every flake as broad as a crown piece and sharp as cut glass. Grandfather swore he counted the first hundred, and not one of them was the same. He kept a tin of them on the sill by morning and tipped a pinch into the sea to see if they would sink. They never did. They turned over in the black water and kept their shape, the way a good idea does when you've given up hoping for it.

Past midnight, a tall gentleman came up the cliff path with no lantern and no hat. He had a face like a harvest moon left too long in the field, and a grin wide enough to swallow a cellar door. He asked, very politely, where a man might buy a Christmas. Grandfather said the shops were shut and the nearest was a day's walk inland. The gentleman sighed, scratched his bony chin, and admitted he had spent his whole life being the king of frights and was tired of the job. Perhaps the sea had something different for him.

Grandfather poured him a second cup of cocoa and gave him the stool beside the lamp. By dawn the visitor had gone, and in the frost on the lamp glass sat one small pink snowflake, warm to the touch. Grandfather kept it in his waistcoat pocket until the day he died. I have it still. Don't ask to see it, though. It melts when the light is lit.