How do you use the season as inspiration without using the season as inspiration? It’s a tricky question.
The winter holiday season seems to elbow its way into our lives earlier every year—lights appearing before the leaves have even fallen, carols echoing long before snow arrives. But creative inspiration shouldn’t feel like a force‑feed. So how do we tap into the richness of this time of year without drowning in holiday spirit we never asked for?
Then it dawned on me: snow globes.
These little baubles come in every imaginable shape and size, and so many of them aren’t tied to holidays at all. They can be playful, eerie, nostalgic, surreal, or downright strange. When I was in elementary school, we made our own snow globes—baby food jars filled with glitter and miniature winter scenes. They were messy, handmade, and wildly charming. And honestly? What better raw material for creative work is there?
Plus, if you’re feeling adventurous, you can blend the literary with the literal and craft your own snow globe as part of your writing ritual. (Highly recommended.)
Inspiration Prompt: Snow Globe
Imagine a world small enough to hold, yet vast enough to transform you.
There’s something irresistibly enchanting about a snow globe. Glitter drifting like slow‑falling stars. Tiny houses and trees arranged just so. Whole towns frozen mid‑breath—every window aglow, every path untraveled. Turn the globe in your hands and time seems to pause. Shake it, and the sky erupts in a private blizzard. These little worlds invite us to wonder what it might feel like to live inside a universe bound by glass.
For this week’s creative experiment, sink into that magic—then unsettle it.
What if you woke one morning and found yourself inside a snow globe?
Outside forces—hands much larger than your own—disturb the ground whenever your world is tilted or rattled. Maybe you learn to read weather patterns based on someone else’s mood. Maybe tremors become a language; maybe glitter becomes prophecy.
What sounds fill such a place? What does warmth mean when it comes only from a hidden light under plastic snow?
Or picture your own city sealed inside an invisible dome.
Snow tumbles steadily from a cloudless sky. Year‑round drifts bury familiar landmarks. The ground gives small, frequent shudders. Daylight bends oddly, refracted against an unseen, curved boundary—enough to make shadows behave like strangers.
Do people adapt? Resist? Celebrate? How long before your community begins to wonder whether you’re being observed?
And consider this twist:
Someone from a place without winter—a desert, a humid coastline, a dry savanna—is suddenly thrust into this permanent blizzard.
What does cold mean to someone who has never felt it? What memories become useless? What new skills or survival instincts sharpen under pressure? How might such a climate, relentless and alien, reshape identity, relationships, or a sense of home?
Your invitation this week:
Write into the wonder. Sketch into the distortion. Collage into the beauty. Photograph the unease.
Your medium doesn’t matter—only your curiosity does. Explore how environments transform us, how confinement distorts perception, how a small world can become limitless when imagination cracks the glass.
What changes in this miniature world?
What becomes newly possible?
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