Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow

The weather outside is not so frightful in uptown Feltham, but the snow is so delightful! At last, only two days late, the snow is falling and the seasonal atmosphere is complete, particularly when accompanied by The Muppet Christmas Movie on TV.

It's strange how seduced we are by white precipitation from on high at this time of year. Of course, it brings out the child in all of us, and my thoughts turn immediately to the winter of 63, when I were nowt but a boy of 4, building my first snowman in the garden here with my little brother. Coal from a brick bunker for his eyes and a carrot for a nose- the snowman, that is, not brother Matthew. The best thing to do with carrots, as back then I certainly wouldn't have been eating them with the Christmas dinner. Indeed, Matthew and I often hatched elaborate plans to disguise our non-eating of them, mainly "plan b" I think.

Snow gives everything it kisses with its multi-faceted flakes a seasonal makeover. When I first saw it one winter day in the sixties, I exclaimed "Oh look, Jack Frost has been round and painted all the rooves with talcum powder!" It's like the seasonal sequins on a New Year's Eve ball gown, and nothing looks more wonderful when nature in its nakedness is clothed in white glory. Somehow when it snows, the cinderella of our lives becomes the wide-eyed, anything is possible dreams of our childhoods again.

But the problem with snow is it melts. Like our dreams...?

There the analogy should stop, for as the author of a Christian book once put it "Dead Dreams Can Live". This Christmas has been for me, contrary to my expectations, one of the happiest I can remember, certainly since childhood. And yet, in my imagination I expected anything but, it being the first one spent without our dear Mum with my brother and I. And Suddenly, there is inside me a new hope that my dreams can live, that they needn't become like the deceased Snowman in Raymond Briggs' perennially magical and yet poignant tale. I feel that I have crossed over, as it were, from a winter of discontent to a new season of opportunity, and the Holy Spirit, in his divine wisdom, is showing me things about myself and my potential I had always thought could only exist in dreams.

Time will of course tell. The Holy Spirit blows where He will, like the blizzards currently engulfing parts of the South East, causing me to think today of friends in Kent who may well be snowed in for a while. I know that they were looking forward to snow, and with a two-year old and five month old baby in toe, what better festive scene could there be to finish their Christmas.

However, the romantic notions of pretty scenes become rather more like nightmares when trying to drive on ungritted rural roads. But even the stranded driver, not knowing where to turn next, knows that the snow will eventually melt and he will find his way home. God does that in our lives too, and the more of him that falls on us from on high, the better. He did it for Moses and his people with manna: he still does it today where people will trust him to turn a weary planet to a world in white. Unlike U2's visions for New Year's Day though, when that happens, everything changes.