Make it snow

For me, this time of year is about closure and renewal. It’s about traditions and family and reflection. It’s about your friends and family and friends you consider family. I like to take some time at the end of the year to reflect and plan, but I am acutely aware that it is a luxury not often easily available.

This has been an exceptionally chaotic year in our house, which may be evident from the sparseness of my blogging activity this year, and it has been challenging to just sit for a few minutes and gather my thoughts, but here we are a few days from Christmas and I finally have a few minutes of calm to write.

Usually, I like to fill the few weeks of December with as many Christmas movies and shows as possible, including some great old classics that my kids like to remind me are from “last century”. Even though I have not watched the show this year yet, the Snow Miser song has been rattling around in my head for weeks. You know the one I mean – from The Year Without A Santa Claus (1974) where Snow Miser is introducing himself.

I’m Mister White Christmas, I’m Mister Snow.
I’m Mister Icicle; I’m Mister Ten below.
Friends call me Snow Miser, whatever I touch,
turns to snow in my clutch.
I’m too much.
~ “Snow Miser” by Maury Laws and Jules Bass
The Year Without A Santa Claus (1974)

This is pretty empowering when you think about it. Snow is just frozen water mist that is not even as stable as actual ice. It is fragile, transient, temporary, fleeting – and yet Snow Miser owns it like a boss. He takes the natural gift he has been given and makes it his superpower, owning it and bending it to his will. Mr. Ten Below blankets everything he sees with that fine white icy goodness that chills everything so it can be renewed when it thaws. To some it is just cold and wet and gross, but it has an important and necessary function. Its a matter of perspective.

Which brings me back to family and friends and all our weirdness and oddities that mesh together to make us a community. We all have a superpower that is important and useful and needed. For some it is buried, for some it is obvious, and many people are not even aware they have one. Like Mr. White Christmas, they may just see the immediate result, and not realize the beautiful after effect that changes the world. So go ahead Mr. Icicle, make it snow.

Regardless of how you weirdos spend the last few weeks of the year, I want to wish all of the friends in my community joy and happiness. Catch you again in the thaw.

~ Tom