Reminds me of the Paul Bunyan tale called "The Winter of the Blue Snow".

It seems Johnny Inkslinger, Paul's accountant, who used so much ink in keeping the books that he had to buy it by the vat, had some accident--don't remember what--but the huge quantities of blue ink were exploded into the air and absorbed by the clouds and spread all over the earth.

This had two big effects, as I recall: The snow that winter was BLUE from the ink, and so much sunlight was absorbed by the ink up there that it was a horribly cold, long winter. And all the time BLUE snow! The blue snow lasted all through the summer.

The following winter (without any intervening summer) the ink had finally been snowed out, so that one day there was a WHITE snow! Everybody was amazed! They'd forgotten about white snow! So they gathered some of that white snow for souvenirs, kept it in their freezers to tell their grandkids about the WHITE snow!

"And I can prove it's true! Here's one of those white snowballs that I've saved all this time from that day!"

Dave Oesterreich