Making
Memories

The Big Snowman and the Little One

The Making Memories series launched in 2008 with a simple, warm concept: a father snowman and a child snowman, together, doing the things that make December feel like December. Trimming the tree. The sweetest gift. Laughing all the way. Reading by the fire. Frosting friends. Cocoa cuddles. Milk and cookies. Trying out the new trike on Christmas morning. Cozy new pajamas. Storytime snuggles before bed. Roasting s'mores over a campfire.

The premise has never needed to be more complex than that. The series is about the texture of the holiday season as experienced from the smaller side of the height difference — the child's-eye view of December, where everything is slightly too tall to reach and slightly too exciting to sleep through. The big snowman is always present and always engaged. The little snowman is always discovering something. Together they make up a scene so specific that anyone who has ever been either the big snowman or the little one recognizes it immediately.

Tammy Haddix has sculpted every entry since 2008 — eighteen consecutive years of these two snowmen in a different moment of holiday joy, the same characters in a new scene, the same warmth in a new form. The series remains ongoing, which means the next memory hasn't been made yet.

Tammy Haddix — The Memory-Maker

The Season's Smallest, Most Specific Joys

The Making Memories series doesn't depict Christmas in its grand, idealized form — no sleighs, no workshops, no star-crowned trees in palatial living rooms. It depicts Christmas in its particular, domestic, small-scale form: the cookies that need frosting, the gift that won't stay wrapped, the cocoa that needs a cuddle to taste right, the book that should have been finished before bedtime but wasn't. These are the December activities that don't photograph well but that people remember most clearly — the texture of the season rather than its highlight reel.

The choice to tell these stories through a snowman family is a deliberate softening that makes the universality easier to access. A father and child decorating a tree together is a scene that belongs to specific families in specific homes. A big snowman and a little snowman hanging ornaments belongs to everyone — it's the same emotional content without the specificity that might make some viewers feel excluded. The snowman format is Hallmark's way of making the series belong to any family, not just the ones that look like the ornament.

Eighteen entries across eighteen years. Each one a different scene. Each one the same warmth. The series is still going, which means there are still memories left to make.

Tips for the Collection

• 01
  Arrange in chronological order for the full eighteen-year narrative. Displayed in sequence from Trimming the Tree (2008) to Scrumptious S'mores (2025), the collection reads as a family album of December — the same two characters growing through eighteen different versions of the same warm season. The progression from #1 to #18 is itself a story.
• 02
  The series is a natural gift for a grandparent or parent starting their first collection. The snowman family concept has broad appeal — the big snowman and little snowman are recognizable archetypes that resonate across ages and family configurations. An entry from the year a child was born makes a particularly meaningful gift: the ornament captures what December looked like the year that child arrived.
• 03
  The later entries (2019–2025) tend toward the coziest domestic scenes. Milk and Cookies, Cozy New Pajamas, Storytime Snuggles, Dancing to the Beat, Wrapping Lesson, Scrumptious S'mores — the most recent entries have leaned into bedtime routines, kitchen activities, and fireside moments that skew toward the warmest possible reading of December. These entries are particularly suited to family-focused trees.
• 04
  Look for the recurring supporting cast. Many entries include a kitten or puppy — Wrapping Lesson (2024) has a curious kitten playing with ribbon; Dancing to the Beat (2023) has a puppy watching the snowmen dance around a record player. Finding all the pet appearances across the series is a small, rewarding Easter egg hunt within the larger collection.
• 05
  The series is ongoing — the 2025 entry is #18. Already Christmas carries all eighteen confirmed entries, from the founding Trimming the Tree through Scrumptious S'mores. The 19th entry is coming; the collection is still being written.