Ho frost.

It's getting hairy out there.

Took the dog out yesterday morning and was quite impressed by the hairy-looking frost all over everything. Here's a closeup.

Aha! I said. Hoarfrost! And the dog looked at me funny. Because he probably knew that I didn't know what hoarfrost is. I just thought it looked like what I would expect hoarfrost to look like. As I've said many times, I am one of nature's great indoorsmen, and there are very few meteorological phenomena beyond the most obvious that I can identify. Or flora. Or fauna. Which one is "fauna" again?

Hoarfrost is the kind of word you expect to see in fantasy novels with battleaxe-wielding dwarves on the cover. Those dwarves are so hairy, even their frost is hairy! 

But is it hoarfrost? The Wikipedia page on frost lists six varieties of frost with many different names and subtypes (who knew?), and I can't quite tell. It's a function of the ambient temperature, humidity, wind speed, and maybe day of the week, not appearance. Although advection frost looks kind of like what I'm seeing. But it wasn't windy. Maybe it is hoarfrost.

Of course, in the Explicit Lyrics section this would be Ho Frost, which is an entirely different thing.

And in the Kids' Holiday section it's Ho-Ho-Ho Frost.

Nah, I'm going back to the Norse dwarves. Hoarfrost Ironson is the hero of my next novel, The Quest of the Saga of the Sword: Hoarfrost's Curse. It's Book I of Trilogy 1 of the FrostWorld series. No idea what will be going on, but there will be ogres. Got to have ogres.