SUDBURY -- It's not everyday you see a 'smoking' snow sculpture but thanks to lots of hard work and ingenuity, the Hawdon family in Lively have managed to achieve the unbelievable.

This year's 'stay at home' order might have put a damper on the Walden Winter Carnival but it forced organizers to bring back some of the old favourites, including a snow sculpture contest.

The Hawdon family decided it would be a great way to spend some family time together and their creation has got a lot of people talking.

They've put together the carnival's Wally, a 'Big Nickel' and a Superstack complete with working smoke.

"It was a couple days of great fun for us," said mom Kristen. "The carnival had several events and we spent a week, I think we did 4 contests."

The sculpture contest took about 12 to 15 hours from start to finish. It became a labour of love for dad Brian who tells CTV News this was an all hands on deck project.

"Once we decided Sudbury with the 'Big Nickel' and the 'Superstack', my wife, father-in-law and I were chatting about how do we get smoke to go through this thing so we got the idea of putting some rigid duct work through the middle of it and framing it out, from there it was finding a way how to do the smoke," he said.

He paid a visit to the local drug store after inquiring if they had any products with ammonia nitrate.

"I had to convince them that I wasn't doing something that I shouldn't be doing that was illegal in the process and it ended up working well, we got some great smoke going through the stack," he laughed.

The couple's two children are home schooled so it also provided some hands-on learning when it came to science.

The family had to make its own snow due to a lack of packing snow over the past week.

"We did learn about that stuff and mixing things for science," said their son Rowen.

"We took some water and filled it up in a bucket and then we took a shovel and put some snow into a tote and then we mixed it and that made sticky snow," said their daughter Mikaela.

The sculpture has been a hit with those online and the Hawdon family's neighbours."It's fantastic, it's lots of hard work, you just have to look at it and know what they did, that takes a lot of time and effort," said neighbour Barry Ernst.

"We love the smoking smoke stack if you will and the Big Nickel, it was a great entry and great input that was fantastic," said Walden Winter Carnival chair Sam Thine.

There's no word yet on what the family will build for the next carnival but this one they know will definitely be hard to top.