Are you baking?
Wrapping?
Prepping for company?
‘Tis the season – and the countdown is underway!
The temperature dropped precipitously in North Texas today. Flurries of white flakes had the girls and I pressed to cold window panes, gawking gleefully, earlier.
And the suddenly frigid conditions have me thinking about Christmas as a specific-to-December Christian holiday.
What does it mean, I’m asking myself, that God chose to be born in the middle of winter?
It’s easy to hopscotch over the seasonal specificity of Christmas. Historians muddle things by pointing out early Christian accommodation of pagan rituals in the Roman Empire – of Easter linking the Resurrection to “Estes”, the pagan celebration of spring and fertility; and of Christ’s birth being linked to the pagan festival of lights and the god Saturn.
But I think the Incarnation as a winter event has profound, urgently relevant significance.
Consider the best-selling Christmas song of all time: Bing Crosby’s mellow tones, wistfully confessing that he’s “dreaming… of a white… Christmas…” The magic of that music derives from an allure which goes beyond picturesque crooning. The notion of a white Christmas evokes images of powerful patterns of connection.
How so?
Cold drives us inside, pulls us toward one another, reinstates relationship as the fundamental human condition.
A roaring fire and a pot of hot chocolate exert their magnetism precisely because they offer respite from exposure to inhospitable weather… and the urge to huddle together, to snuggle up, grows strong when sitting alone feels shivery.
When it’s cold and dark outside, gathering around a shared source of light and heat is a primal human instinct.
That instinct derives from the truth of our made-in-God’s-image nature and brings us to the unavoidable point of the timing of Christ’s birth: at Christmas, the Light of the World shatters the darkness to draw all people into His Light – to warm us with His love – to give us hope and purpose by His truth.
Cold weather literally, viscerally reminds us: we were made for communion with one another and with our Creator. We were designed to depend on Him; we flourish only as we lean into His provision and protection.
My favorite Christmas carol, a poem by Christina Rossetti set to music by Harold Darke, links the miracle of Christ’s birth to the desolate darkness of December to emphasize humanity’s desperate need:
In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow,
In the bleak midwinter, long ago.
Our God, Heaven cannot hold Him, nor earth sustain;
Heaven and earth shall flee away when He comes to reign.
In the bleak midwinter a stable place sufficed
The Lord God Almighty, Jesus Christ…
The keening lamentation of the wind, the metallic barrenness of the earth, the frozen water and deep, deep snow – into that howling, haunted wasteland comes the God which Heaven itself cannot hold.
The stable that “sufficed” for the King of kings, in this context, was surely frigid but for the body heat of the animals within it… the Creator kept warm, kept alive, by the proximity of His own creatures… Humility chosen, humility embraced, out of extravagant love that would carry the Lover from the manger to Calvary.
As the temperature continues to drop outside, I thank God for electricity and a gas fire, and warm clothes.
But I also thank God for the reminder that all this light and heat that provides my comfort right now is merely a transient earthly form of the Light and Warmth that He promises me, forever, in Him.
Without Jesus – without Christmas – I am lost in the bleak midwinter, wandering hopeless and helpless, forever outside. But in Jesus – because of Christmas – I am warm, safe, welcomed in. Forever.
Which brings us, full circle, back to Bing Crosby’s crooning… After all, his song ends on a theological high note. I’ll close with it here:
May your days be merry and bright… and may all your Christmases be white!
