Snow on Snow

 ‘Like December snow, that lays in the wood

You're gone too soon..

…life can be like December snow’

‘December Snow’ by the Moody Blues

I have quoted this Moody Blues song before… and the snow has fallen in Advent before… and it has certainly fallen when we have been here on our Speyside break in the first week of December. The photo above shows the view earlier today from our window here in our timeshare lodge; not very much snow, but a little, and yesterday especially, it looked very pretty.

Any eager readers of my various posts on my blog in years past will recall that I have an ambivalent attitude towards snow. I enjoy looking out at it. Indeed, if properly dressed, I can enjoy walking in it. But when I need to go somewhere, need to drive, or am awaiting a delivery, or whatever, I really do not like the snow. It looks beautiful, but it also disrupts life. 

So, when the snow begins to fall, I find myself conflicted; I find delight and anxiety arise in equal measure!

As I have suggested in years’ past, there are two sides to snow… and there are two sides to Advent also. 

This is the season when we begin to look ahead to Christmas and anticipate the celebration of Jesus birth. But it is also a season of waiting and of ‘not yet’. Hope on the one hand, and delay on the other. The joy and peace is tempered by the awareness that the coming of God’s Kingdom in all its fulness is not yet. We sing of peace but we still are so acutely aware of so much conflict in our world (even, at this time, in that very land in which our Saviour was born). We talk of joy, but we know that there are many who are so weighed down with despair, anxiety, dread, illness or loss.

But, it is into the darkness that the light shines, and hope is born. That is what we are invited to remember and reaffirm in Advent. God’s Kingdom is not yet, but in its time it will come. 

One of the favourite Christmas Carols of many people is ‘In the Bleak Mid-Winter’:

In the bleak mid-winter

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 mid-winter

Long ago

(Christina Rossetti) 

I have to confess, it is far from my favourite – very far!

The popular tune by Gustav Holst I find far from inspiring (and I generally love Holst’s work). The tune by Harold Darke so often sung by choirs at services of Lessons and Carols is much more appealing to me. 

But it is the words of that first verse I find most unappealing (and the rest of the verses are wonderful!). That first verse is so very depressing! And don’t start me on the fact that Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem was almost certainly not in the ‘bleak mid-winter’ and there was scarce chance of frost, still less ‘snow on snow’?!?

And yet, I presume that even if most of those who sing and love this carol may imagine that it was in such a bleak meteorological context that the birth of Jesus took place, Christina Rossetti knew better. So, what then is she saying? 

Is it perhaps that it is in the bleakest, darkest, ‘coldest’, most forbidding times in our lives (and in our world?) that hope is born and the light shines?

Indeed, one musicologist has suggested that verse 1 of this carol is ‘a metaphor for a "harsh spiritual landscape" experienced at the time of Christ's birth’. If so, it speaks to all of us in the face of the blizzards and bleakness that can afflict us.

It is in such times, that hope is born.

It is in the darkness, that the light shines.

It may be worth looking afresh at this carol…