A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
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yukimi
Yukimi is the Japanese practice of gathering to look at falling or fallen snow. It completes a set of three viewing customs with cherry blossom in spring and the moon in autumn, and it is the winter member: a room opened to the garden, something warm to drink, and the snow watched as it comes down or as it lies on stone and pine.
Etymology
The word means snow-viewing, built exactly like hanami for flowers and tsukimi for the moon. The three together are sometimes called the snow, moon, and flowers, a phrase taken from a Chinese poem that has served as a shorthand for the beauty of the four seasons in Japanese writing for over a thousand years.
Notes
A specific garden lantern, the yukimi-dōrō, is designed for it: broad, low, and wide-roofed, set beside water so that snow collects on the cap and the whole thing becomes a white shape reflected in the pond. The site carries yukigeshiki, the snow-covered scene itself, and hanafubuki, the blizzard of falling petals, which is the spring equivalent named after this one.