The asterisk with the open centre often reminds of a snowflake. That's why it's often used as a dingbat in theme posts about winter, Christmas, and New Year festivities. In some cases the six-pointed icon replaces the five-pointed typograph star U+002A. For example, to signify footnotes, comments, lists.

Unicode has more detailed snowflakes, including the heavy chevron snowflake U+2746 [U:2746] and tight trifoliate [U:2745].