Bidders Are Lining Up to Be Snowed

The picture shows a misshapen ball of snow stuck in a freezer next to a carton of Breyers ice cream.

A South Texas man had scooped up the snow from his yard after a freak storm Christmas Eve. Nine days later he posted a photo of the snowball on EBay and, as of Tuesday, the highest bid was $100.

The rare storm has inspired at least four other Texans to sell snow online, promoting their frosty treasures with an imagination that’s crucial when the product is frozen water.

Patricia Lucas, an 18-year-old student from Sugar Land near Houston, assured potential buyers that her snow was “in great condition, very clean bright white.”

Bidders will have to take her word for it. Lucas doesn’t own a digital camera or scanner and couldn’t include a picture with her EBay listing.

Still, 27 people had bid on the tennis-ball-sized snowball by Tuesday. The highest bid exceeded $200.

“I was really shocked it got that high,” Lucas said in a phone interview. “But people sell crazy stuff on EBay, and I figured someone would buy a snowball.”

When it started snowing in earnest, Lucas was so excited that she ran outside -- barefoot. “It was the first time I saw snow here,” she said. “My neighbors were going around screaming and everything. This was history.”

She stuck her tongue out to catch the snow and made some snow angels, but before long her merchandising instinct kicked in. Lucas collected snow from the patio table -- “to make sure it was clean” -- and formed it into balls, which she put in her mother’s freezer.

The snowball for sale on EBay is secure in a Ziploc bag. “I check on it quite often to make sure it doesn’t get damaged,” she said.

The sale is “probably weird for people who live up north and see snow all the time,” Lucas said. But Christmas Eve marked the first real snow in Houston in decades; farther south in the Rio Grande Valley, snow fell for the first time in more than 100 years.

Lucas will sell one snowball and keep the rest for herself.

“Maybe forever,” she said.