More than a White Christmas

It is snowing as I write.  What a winter wonderland our landscape is with snow lying heavy on every shrub and tree branch.  I love it. "White Christmas" is a movie classic shown over and over again each Christmas.  For those of us who live in the northern hemisphere and northern latitudes like Michigan, snow for Christmas is a given.  Every year the first cold blasts of winter pick up warm water from Lake Michigan and cover our homes and landscape with snow creating a winter wonderland this time of year.  For Michiganders, Christmas with no snow just doesn't feel right.  Later on we complain as winter lingers on and on into March, even April and sometimes dare I say it, May.  But all seems right with November/December snow.  The legend of Santa Claus traveling from the north pole on his sleigh pulled by reindeer assumes a snowy winter Christmas.  It is a Northern Hemisphere based legend.

All of this got turned upside down for my wife Eileen, and me, when we went to Brazil in 1977 as mission workers with the Presbyterian Church.  We left days after Thanksgiving for Campinas, Brazil, a few hours drive northwest of Sao Paulo at 23 degrees south latitude.  We studied Portuguese there for three months before traveling on to Porto Franco at the edge of the rainforest at 5 degrees south latitude, where we worked for 2 1/2 years.  We were young and up for adventures.  Our first big adventure was experiencing Christmas in the southern hemisphere where it was summer!  Christmas in summer?  How does that happen with warm sunny long days and short nights?  Well, it does. You just have to park all the cultural trappings, leave behind all the family heirloom ornaments and traditions, and focus on the birth of Jesus! 

That first Advent in Brazil, Eileen and I had no Christmas decorations to put up.  So we made a nativity out of school supplies Eileen had taken for her students. The house plants our mothers took pains to grow were growing outside there, blooming in all their glory. We cut fresh flowers growing in flower beds outside and decorated our apartment with them.  It was different but beautiful.  We exchanged gifts and sang carols with the church folk in Portuguese.

I love a white Christmas.  It's one of the things I love about living in Michigan.  But it turns out that Bethlehem is at 31 degrees north latitude.  It gets a little brisk there in December, but nothing like we know here at 42 degrees north latitude.   It seems silly to me how people in warmer climates are portrayed in movies painting their lawns white and covering their roofs with an artificial white blanket for the right "Christmas effect." 

Christ transcends culture!  And so does Christmas, the celebration of Christ's birth. At Christmas we celebrate God's reign breaking into our world which disrupts our zero sum ways where only a few are blessed and the multitude make do with what they can scratch out of life.  Snow or no snow, longest night or shortest, houses decorated to the hilt or not, Christ comes to usher in God's blessed reign of love and peace.  In God's reign there is justice, a fair share, enough for everyone!  For a season we scramble to give poor tots a toy.  The question is, why are so many tots so needful in the first place?  In Jesus birth, God comes among us and disrupts our distorted zero sum ways, and in his life shows us what it looks like to live in God's abundance.  Jesus calls us to follow him in ushering in God's reign constraining greed and building a community where all are blessed!  We can do so anytime, anywhere, NO SNOW REQUIRED!  But I still love a white Christmas!!!

    

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