When you were little, did you ever make candy rock-crystals? Where you'd fill a Mason jar with just so much sugar and just so much water, maybe some red or blue food coloring, balancing a pencil across the top with a string tied tightly to it? The string would hang down into the water listlessly for a while... but in a day or two, there would be a fuzz of crystal gathering on the cotton. And as days went by, the crystal crept up the string and fattened and grew spiky and heavy, until the string was taut with the weight of the candy on the end. It never tasted like anything more than ordinary granulated sugar... but that wasn't the point. It was beautiful.

That was how the boughs of the trees looked last night... as if God had decided to soak them in a giant Mason jar full of sugar-water. They were so heavy with snow that they looked like they might collapse, their heavenly strings snapping from their heavenly pencils to plummet to the ground.