Frozen

Vespers, Second Week of Advent, A.D. 2013 A

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. AMEN.

A reading from Psalm 147: “He hurls down His crystals of ice like crumbs. Who can stand against His cold?”

And again, from the book of Job: “From the chamber of the south comes the whirlwind, and cold from the scattering winds of the north. By the breath of God ice is given, and the broad waters are frozen.”

Frozen—what better way to describe the upper Midwest in the bleak December?

It’s very difficult for me to imagine anything other than a White Christmas. All my childhood memories of yuletide cheer, all the popular images of literature and the media, present to us a Christmas frosted like fine pastry in icicles and snow. Our children delightedly romp their way through snow days, making snow angels, rolling out snowmen, and throwing snowballs from behind snow forts. Besides, where would our Christmas lights be without ice and snow to enhance their beauty? How would our Christmas wreaths pop with color unless they had this vast expanse of white as their backdrop and surroundings?

Granted, Minnesota winters might overdo things just a tad. I’ve long wondered what frost giant we’ve so upset that he often blasts us pitilessly from Halloween until May Day. I’ll never forget my first winter in North Dakota, just across the river. It was negative 40 when I got off the plane, so cold that I couldn’t breathe. Rather I doubled over hacking as my wife encouraged me to “just sip the air here.” I had to give up on my daily constitutionals, as the wind off the Red River drove daggers into my ever-lengthening forehead. “How could people live here?” I asked incredulously. I mean, they settled this place burning buffalo chips in sod huts!

But I adapted, as we all do. My chest puffed out a little with pride when I first considered negative 20 to be “not bad.” It’s like learning you can breathe underwater. Now, going into my eighth such December, I view the Midwestern winter much as the natives do: as something beautiful and serene, which nevertheless is always trying to kill you. Ice, as we read above, has that mixture of danger and beauty that demands our awe, our respect. Ice comes from the breath of God.

This is why a White Christmas seems so infinitely superior to a warm and sunny Christmas. I realize that people all over the world—in Latin America, northern Africa, the Pacific, Southeast Asia—they all celebrate a warm Christmas. And God bless them as they welcome the King of Kings into their homes! I even realize that the first Christmas was almost certainly a warm affair, at least by Minnesota standards. December or not, I’ve been to the Holy Land in the dead of winter, and let me tell you, it might get a little bit nippy in the evening but it’s a balmy 70 or so during the day—plenty warm for shepherds in the field by night and a family taking refuge amongst barnyard animals in a cave.

The reason that we celebrate a White Christmas, an icy, snowy, frosty Christmas, is because we live at a high, snowy latitude, and by-and-large we hail from northerly European climes. We are Finns and Germans and Norwegians. We know snow! And to have Christmas fall when it does, in the bleakest, coldest, harshest part of the year—this, I think, is a remarkable blessing. I think it makes us amongst the luckiest people in the world, so far as Christmas celebrations go.

Keep in mind that we don’t put up palm trees amidst the snowdrifts, do we? But from Malibu to Queensland, folks put up evergreens and fake snow and fur-suited Santas in the hottest of climates—because, oddly enough, everybody wants a White Christmas, a cold Christmas, a frozen Christmas. Why is that, do you think? Why, at this singular time of the year, are balmier climes envious of our icy cold domain? I think it’s because, paradoxically, we feel warmer than they do. Hear me out on this one.

In Moby-Dick, Herman Melville claims that no one ever feels so warm as when one little part of him remains cold, like a chilly nose poked out over a thick comforter. The same idea is at work here. No one appreciates a fire so much as those surrounded by snow. Hot chocolate never tastes so sweet as over chapped lips beneath a frost-nipped nose. The joys of Christmas, the light and warmth and laughter and love, are all the more intense, all the more luxurious, because they glow delightfully on in spite of the winds and snows and storms raging at the window panes.

Who looks forward to the light of Christ more than those who truly dwell in deep darkness? Who needs joy more than a hard-bitten Finn for whom negative 30 is just another day at the office? People of ice know the value of fire. People of shadow know the beauty of light. People who daily brave the untamed elements know the peace and security of a warm, safe, and loving home—not to mention the value of good neighbors who can pull your car out of the ditch when you slide off the road. It is beautiful, this frozen land. By its very nature it keeps us ever mindful of those things which are truly important: faith and hope, family and friends, love of God and love of neighbor, gathered ‘round the sacred rites of hearth and home.

G.K. Chesterton put it best some hundred years back when he wrote the following:

The splendour of the 25th of December … celebrates Christianity itself. Dickens and all the jolly English giants who write of the red firelight are grossly misunderstood in this matter. Prigs call them coarse and materialistic because they write about the punch and plum pudding of winter festivals. The prigs do not see that if these writers were really coarse and materialistic they would not write about winter feasts at all. Mere materialists would write about summer and the sun.

The whole point of winter pleasure is that it is a defiant pleasure, a pleasure armed and at bay. The whole point is in the fierce contrast between the fire and wine within and the roaring rains outside. And some part of the sacredness of firelight we may allow to fireworks.

I can think of no better place to celebrate the Incarnation of Love into the world than right here in the frozen north, and no better folk with whom to celebrate our Lord’s Nativity than you good people here.

God bless, be joyful, and keep warm. But perhaps not too warm.

In Jesus’ Name. AMEN.

The Feast of the Snow, by G.K. Chesterton

There is heard a hymn when the panes are dim,
And never before or again,
When the nights are strong with a darkness long,
And the dark is alive with rain.

Never we know but in sleet and snow
The place where the great fires are,
That the midst of earth is a raging mirth,
And the heart of the earth a star.

And at night we win to the ancient inn,
Where the Child in the frost is furled,
We follow the feet where all souls meet,
At the inn at the end of the world.

The gods lie dead where the leaves lie red,
For the flame of the sun is flown;
The gods lie cold where the leaves are gold,
And a Child comes forth alone.