Snowman Confessions

As I write this, I’m cradling a corncob pipe between my teeth. It protrudes, as all pipes should, from the corner of my mouth.

If you asked me why, I’m not sure I could tell you. It just feels right somehow.

Maybe it was just an impulse buy at the craft store – like the Grinch mug I purchased for my “not Christmas-y enough” husband – or the “naked” nativity set I’m hoping my teen/ tween will paint over the break because family togetherness is their deepest Christmas wish.

Maybe it’s that EVERY time I turn on COZY 101.1, “Frosty the Snowman” plays right after WHAM!’s “Last Christmas” – as these appear to be the only two songs licensed to the station. More likely, it captured my imagination sitting there on the shelf. Snowmen, you see, do that especially well.

Christmas Past

Memories flood in: like when I crowned my own “Frosty” with Dad’s florescent hunting hat and armed him with Mom’s only broom. Someone stole the hat. Brooms, apart from Shakespearean plays, aren’t the deterrents I imagined.

If you were lucky enough to experience childhood in chilly places, I’ll wager you have your own personal library of snowman stories: How you found the perfect stick that branched out at the tips like fingers; or how you began with a hand-packed snowball and transformed it into a monster-sized base as big as you were; and how it unveiled a thick carpet of dormant grass in its wake. The possibilities were as limitless as our imaginations allowed. It was easy to get lost in the creative flow of it all – at least until the sun sank and our fingers, one-by-one, grew numb. We’d trudge into toasty homes with the satisfaction that we created something or someone. It was magical.

Christmas Present

Maybe that’s why I bought the pipe. Here, in a season where the world feels heavy, I’m craving a little magic. A little escape from the realities of a world that lays, still, “in sin and error, pining.” ¹ “The holidays are fraught, aren’t they?” messaged my friend, (another) Nicole, this week with understated enthusiasm. I listened to her voicemail and nodded my head with the fanfare of a mime.

Fraught. And then some.

While the odds of my kids joining me in the front yard are worse than them painting the naked nativity – I hold onto a hope of laughter, of bickering suspended, of leaving the strains of finals, college applications, and doctors’ appointments behind us while they mock Frozen for the umpteenth time:

A present that we can actually be present in.

Christmas Future

I found this little man on the tree today:

It’s a treasured ornament crafted by my Aunt Carol to commemorate 1999 in a more subtle way than Prince. Perhaps it is an odd picture to post here under “Christmas Future.” Twenty-four years have passed in my life since I received this. Twenty-four trips from buried basement storage boxes onto a tree: Jobs ended and begun, marriage vows made – and the holy work of keeping them. Children born and unborn children lost in between. Diagnoses. Doubts. Defeats. Deliverance. And always, always His undeniable presence.

And “the soul felt its worth.”¹

Ask me how I think the next twenty four will go, and I’ll tell you that I can’t imagine even an hour past today because – as Nicole reminded me – Christmas is “fraught.” But, then again, that’s right were Jesus wants me to be: this day, with Him “who is, and who was, and who is to come.”
And that, dear ones, is the “thrill of hope” this “weary world” can actually rejoice in.¹

Header Image Credit: Matt Seymour on Unsplash

Taming of the Shrew picture credit: Old Globe Theater Photograph Collection, SDSU University Library Digital Collections.

¹ Adam, Adolphe. Christmas hymn; O holy night.