Children's stories and poems are often meant to carry messages and knowledge into the future.
Hannah Flagg Gould's poem, The Frost, was the first I believe to turn the frost into a character, Jack frost. Or at least the earliest I have found written. Someone who would warn the children to get prepared before the winter, to store food and stay indoors.
Old Man Winter was written about before then, but Hannah lived in Lancaster MA during the Dalton Minimum, and she had experienced the Year Without a Summer.
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Poems_That_Every_Child_Should_Know/The_Frost
There was a Jack Frost cartoon made in 1934 as well...
Source - AnimationStation, youtube
The stories, cartoons and poems were created to share knowledge with us, today, as we head into a new solar minimum cycle.
It has been warm for so many years now, with amazing crops and warm pleasant summers, it has all been forgotten. Most kids these days don't even know who Jack Frost is. If they do it is only because they saw him in Frosty the Snowman's movie. Or worse, he's been villainized into a serial killer or a character who wants to take over Christmas, to the point where he becomes taboo for smaller children to know or talk about.
Jack Frost is an important character, who was created and written about to teach us and all the future generations of children, to get prepared. To store food and know that the deep freeze of the solar minimums will return.
It was no accident that he emerged just at the end of the Dalton Minimum.