Philip the Squirrel dashed along the branch of an old pine tree with the air of a little general. The first snowflakes of winter fluttered through the air, as fine and fragile as spiderwebs. Philip had a grand plan. He didn’t want just any old snowflake. He wanted the most beautiful, most perfect one, a flake that shimmered like a diamond. And he had just spotted one. He carefully caught it on the tip of his bushy tail and quickly leaped down onto a dark piece of bark to get a proper look at it.
“Aha! I’ve got it!” he exclaimed proudly. “It’s perfect! Eliza, look!”
From a nearby pile of leaves, Eliza the Hedgehog poked out her curious little snout. Her quills quivered amusingly as she slowly rolled closer. “Show me, Philip, what have you caught?”
Philip proudly pointed to his treasure. There it lay, a magnificent six-pointed star. But… something wasn’t right. Philip blinked. He looked again. His excitement suddenly deflated like a pricked balloon.
“Oh no,” he whispered in disappointment. “It’s ruined.”
“Ruined? How so?” Eliza wondered, peering closer. “It looks perfectly fine. It has six beautiful points, just as it should.”
“But it’s not white!” Philip lamented, throwing his paws up in despair. “Look! It’s completely transparent! Like a piece of glass or a frozen drop of water. All snow is supposed to be white as milk, and this one… this one of mine is nothing!” It sounded as if someone had stolen the very best nut in the world from him.
Eliza examined the snowflake. Philip was right. Against the dark bark, it was almost invisible, only its edges glinting faintly. “Maybe… maybe it’s just cold and too shy to show its colour,” she suggested carefully.
That gave Philip a flicker of hope. “Good idea! We must warm it up and encourage it!”
First, they gently breathed warm air onto the snowflake. Nothing happened. Then Philip began to sing it a cheerful song about leaping through trees, and Eliza accompanied him with a quiet rustling of leaves. The snowflake didn’t stir; it remained just as transparent.
“It didn’t work,” Philip sighed. “What now? Why isn’t it white like all the others?”
Eliza pondered, and her little eyes began to sparkle. “I know! When we don’t know something, we go to someone who does. We’ll go and see Professor Owl! He lives in the library inside the great oak tree and knows the answer to everything.”
Philip liked the idea. Together, they set off through the forest, which was slowly being coated in a thin layer of snow. On their way, they noticed how the snow behaved under their paws. Where there was only a little, they could see the grass and leaves through it. But where more had fallen, it formed an unbroken white blanket.
Professor Owl’s library was a cosy hollow in the old oak tree, filled with scrolls of bark, inscribed leaves, and shelves made from fungi. The wise old owl was sitting at a desk made from a stump, cleaning his spectacles with a feather.
“Good day, Professor,” they greeted in unison.
“Ah, Philip and Eliza! Welcome, welcome!” he hooted in a friendly voice. “What troubles you, my little explorers? I see a great mystery on your faces.”
Philip told him the whole story: about the perfect snowflake that wasn’t white but transparent, and about their failed attempts to “fix” it.
Professor Owl listened very attentively, his head tilted to one side. When Philip had finished, he didn’t reveal the answer right away. Instead, he asked, “Tell me, Philip, what colour is a single drop of rain?”
“Why, no colour at all,” Philip replied. “It’s transparent.”
“Correct. And what colour is the foam on a stream, when the water is flowing fast and creating lots of little bubbles?”
Eliza thought for a moment. “The foam is white!”
“Very interesting, is it not?” hooted the professor, carefully taking two objects from a shelf. One was a smooth piece of ice, as clear as glass. The other was a bowl full of crushed ice. “With a grown-up’s help, you can try this at home with ice from a freezer. Look through this smooth piece. What do you see?”
Philip and Eliza looked. “We can see everything, it’s transparent,” said Philip.
“Excellent. And now, look at this pile of crushed ice. What colour is it?”
“It’s white!” they both cried at once.
“But why?” Philip asked, bewildered. “It’s still the same ice!”
“Precisely!” Professor Owl smiled. “The secret is not in the snowflake, but in how light interacts with it. Imagine light is made of thousands of tiny, bouncing balls. When they hit one smooth, transparent snowflake, most of them pass straight through. But what happens when there isn’t just one, but millions of snowflakes lying on the ground?”
Just at that moment, a heavy snow began to fall outside. Professor Owl opened a large window made from a thin membrane. The snowflakes tumbled down, dancing in the air and settling one on top of another. In just a moment, the whole landscape below the window was covered in a thick, gleaming layer.
Philip and Eliza stared outside in amazement. Everything was beautifully white.
“Aha!” Philip exclaimed. “I understand now! When there are lots of snowflakes on top of each other, they create lots of tiny little surfaces and edges. Then the little balls of light can’t go straight through. They have to bounce off! They jump from one face to another, get all mixed up, and fly off in every direction!”
“And when all the colours of light get mixed up like that, our eyes see it as white,” Eliza added enthusiastically. “So a single snowflake can’t even be white! It’s all of them together that create the white colour!”
“Precisely, my dears,” Professor Owl hooted with satisfaction. “A single snowflake is like a single musician. It is beautiful in its own right. But only when the entire orchestra of millions of snowflakes comes together is that magnificent white symphony created. Your snowflake wasn’t ruined, Philip. It was perfect. It was the first musician in the orchestra.”
Philip’s face lit up. He felt as though he had discovered the greatest secret of winter. He was no longer sad. He was proud of his little, transparent snowflake, the one that had started the entire white magic.
Together with Eliza, they thanked the professor and ran outside. They leaped into the fresh, soft snow, laughing. They took pawfuls of snow and threw it into the air. Every single snowflake in that flurry was transparent, but all together, they were painting the world white.
“And what do you think, children?” a cheerful narrator’s voice suddenly asked from behind them. “Have you ever noticed that sugar is also white, even though a single crystal is see-through? Or salt? The next time you are cooking, have a good look with your parents!”