One of our favorite winter festivals, the Sapporo Snow Festival in Japan, seriously raised its cool factor (get it?) this year by adding massive Star Wars sculptures to its amazing repertoire, which already includes the likes of manga characters, animals, replicas of the Taj Mahal, and other cartoon characters for up to two million visitors to enjoy every year.

The icy monument stands almost fifty feet tall and almost seventy-five feet wide, and took a crew of two thousand workers a month to turn nearly thirty-five tons of snow into this impressive tribute to the dark forces of the Star Wars pantheon; Stromtroopers, the Death Star, and Darth Vader himself are all there, regally carved like the sinister Sith version Mount Rushmore. That's a damn far cry from the half-melted snowmen with sad carrot noses we've got in America.