Dreaming.

My thoughts this week...

You! Internet! All of you dreaming of a white Christmas! Down there in Miami, in Brisbane, in São Paulo! In Mexico City, in St. Croix, in Quito! In Austin, in Johannesburg, in Southern California, God help you! (Really: God help you.) All of you with visions of a December 25 covered in fluffy white blankets of snow....

KNOCK IT OFF! 

You're dreaming down there, but the snow keeps landing on me up here!

When I was a kid and we were all going to be killed by the Ice Age, I never, ever saw snow at Christmas. Just rain. My memory is a little wonky, but I think it rained every single Christmas from the time I was in kindergarten to two years after I graduated from college. Maybe I'm slightly off on that. 

But the point is, I don't live much farther north from the ol' hometown and it's snowed here three times in the last week. We basically get a white Christmas every year. Which means we risk acute myocardial infarction shoveling, take our families' lives in our hands to go visit Ma, and poor sanitation men have to be away from their own families to plow and salt the roads. 

If you live somewhere that never gets snow, I'm sure you'd like to see it at Christmastime. And then you'd go home. I'll be out there freezing with the dogs, or enjoying an acute myocardial infarction. You'll be back home at the pool. 

I know. It's festive. 

Festive.

I blame Irving Berlin and Bing Crosby, of course. After Bing sang "White Christmas" in the 1942 film Holiday Inn, the song won an Oscar, sold 100 million copies, and held the record as the best-selling single from 1942 to 1998 (and remains the best-selling single of all time). From them on, people all started dreaming wistfully of snowy Christmases. Thanks, Bing. 

"Bing" is also the sound you make
when you fall in the winter.

To be fair, snow and Christmas were old pals in western culture before Holiday Inn. Father Christmas was identified with snow at least as far back as 1854, for one thing.

As I thought more on it, I was reminded of the writings of my friend G. K. Chesterton, or someone I would have liked to have been friends with, in his book The New Jerusalem:

When Jerusalem had been half buried in snow for two or three days, I remarked to a friend that I was prepared henceforward to justify all the Christmas cards. The cards that spangle Bethlehem with frost are generally regarded by the learned merely as vulgar lies. At best they are regarded as popular fictions, like that which made the shepherds in the Nativity Play talk a broad dialect of Somerset. In the deepest sense of course this democratic tradition is truer than most history. But even in the cruder and more concrete sense the tradition about the December snow is not quite so false as is suggested. It is not a mere local illusion for Englishmen to picture the Holy Child in a snowstorm, as it would be for the Londoners to picture him in a London fog. There can be snow in Jerusalem, and there might be snow in Bethlehem; and when we penetrate to the idea behind the image, we find it is not only possible but probable. In Palestine, at least in these mountainous parts of Palestine, men have the same general sentiment about the seasons as in the West or the North. Snow is a rarity, but winter is a reality. Whether we regard it as the divine purpose of a mystery or the human purpose of a myth, the purpose of putting such a feast in winter would be just the same in Bethlehem as it would be in Balham. Any one thinking of the Holy Child as born in December would mean by it exactly what we mean by it; that Christ is not merely a summer sun of the prosperous but a winter fire for the unfortunate.

And then I decided that it was okay if it snows on me, okay if you want it to snow on you, too.

I hope we all keep dreaming of Christmas, whatever color you'd like it to be.