HAPPY NEW YEAR! To celebrate the occasion, meet my two wintery Queens.

According to Russian tradition, Father Frost (Дед Мороз/Ded Moroz in Russian) brings presents for New Year. He's a bit like Santa Claus, and to the Russians who celebrate Christmas in January 7th, New Year is the most important holiday of the season.

My favorite wintery character however is Snow Queen. I loved the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen when I was a child. They were often quite brutal and lacked happy endings, but it made them even more memorable to a child and incredibly fascinating. One of my favorites was the tale of The Snow Queen, the mystic and seemingly evil queen of everything that I loved: ice, snow and cold winters.

The Russians love this tale too and have made several movie adaptations of it, so I thought it fitting to use my bad photoshop skills to combine my two Queens, Aliya Mustafina and the Snow Queen (Снежная королева/Snezhnaya Koroleva in Russian). You can watch an old Soviet animation of the story on Youtube, it has English subtitles ;)

If the second picture looks vaguely familiar, it's because of another famous Snow Queen you might recognize, the White Witch of Narnia. The books of C.S Lewis' about the world of Narnia were also my childhood favorites, and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was definitely my favorite of the series because of its winter theme and fascinating queen.

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The two pictures were originally published last winter on my tumblr.