This past weekend, you likely saw a lot of snowmen and snowwomen in the Meridian and Lauderdale County area.

    But how many snow presidents did you see?

    If you drove by Mark Breazeale’s house in Meridian, you saw at least one.

    Breazeale and his family spent Friday afternoon building a snow Abraham Lincoln to commemorate the 16th president’s birthday on Friday and President’s Day today.

    “We never had enough snow for my son to build a decent snowman, so we decided to get out and do something a little bit different,” said Mark Breazeale, a commercial insurance salesman. “Snow is such a rare thing here; you need to make it memorable.

    “It was a spur-of-the-moment idea.”

    Armed with nothing but a butter knife and a penny, Breazeale, his 12-year-old son, Josh, and his wife, Janice, began forging their snow effigy about 2:30 p.m. on Friday.

    “It took us about two, two and a half hours to do the whole thing,” he said. “It’s really not as complicated as you think.”

    Breazeale downplays the difficulty of harnessing nature to honor significant individuals in human history, but in fact he has done this once before.

    “I did Mary with the baby Jesus right before Christmas,” he said, referring to Dec. 16, 1997, his first stint as snow sculptor back when his family lived in Brandon.

    Breazeale grew up in Collinsville, but for a guy who’s never lived up north and claims he doesn’t “like the cold weather that much,” he knows a thing or two about just how to make detailed snow personalities. 

    “You have to have kind of wet snow so it’ll shape and work correctly, and it’s such a short window that you have as the snow begins to melt,” Mark says. “That was the one problem we had Friday, that it got above freezing.”

    Despite rising temperatures, Breazeale and his family shouldered onward, until the four-and-half-foot snow-Lincoln was completed.

    The masterpiece completed, Breazeale isn’t letting the brief life of his family’s snowy Honest Abe bring down the whole experience.

    “It’s just one of those things you try,” he said  “If it works, it works, and if don’t, you don’t worry about it, cause it’s gone in a day or two.”