Snow on Snow on Snow

Or if the secret ministry of frost
Shall hang them up in silent icicles,
Quietly shining to the quiet moon.

- Samuel Taylor Coleridge

I am dreaming of a white Christmas. And I will have to keep dreaming...

There is nothing better than wrapping up warm to venture outside, and come back in to a warm plate of scones or biscuits and tea. To snuggle under a blanket with a book. To warm your hands in your pockets. I realize I probably romanticize Winter much more than I should, for you are probably thinking it is miserable to be freezing! And perhaps I would feel less love toward Winter if I lived up north where the weather outside is frightful. I am not sure, though, I really do love the cold, and I dream of snow.

So I fictionalize a white Christmas by decorating with a lot of white and on these very warm days we have been encountering preceding Christ's birth, I start to think more about the poems of Christmas. I love how this poem mingles the earthly and the heavenly realms in a cold and dark atmosphere that expresses such hope and jubilation of a world-changing event.

Whether you are having a bleak, cold Winter day or a humid, cloudy Winter day, may the light of Christ shine into that darkness and remind you how the heavenly realm is present and God came to us. I have been dwelling in that thought for while. He came to us. It is a love we don't fully understand, but it is so great, that heaven cannot hold Him back from showing us that love.  

In the Bleak Midwinter
by Christina Rossetti (1830-1894)

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.

Enough for Him, whom cherubim, worship night and day,
Breastful of milk, and a mangerful of hay;
Enough for Him, whom angels fall before,
The ox and ass and camel which adore.

Angels and archangels may have gathered there,
Cherubim and seraphim thronged the air;
But His mother only, in her maiden bliss,
Worshipped the beloved with a kiss.

What can I give Him, poor as I am?
If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb;
If I were a Wise Man, I would do my part;
Yet what I can I give Him: give my heart.