After a long day of Christmas Eve celebrations with seven of their eight children, five of whom were visiting from overseas, Christoph and Satoko Odermatt got to work.
After the kids had all gone to bed, the couple dressed, headed out into the frigid Hokkaido winter and began to spray water with a hose on a large flat area of snow that had been meticulously packed down over the past few weeks.
They would spray for five or six hours in shifts, building centimeters of ice on top of each other.