It’s 2:54AM this Christmas of 2009. The ground is covered with snow. I haven’t seen a Christmas where it snowed on Christmas Eve, so that it was a real White Christmas, since I was a child.

For me, snow is magic. It cleans everything up and paints a layer of purity and newness on the world around me. Anything seems possible in a world where human footprints have never been known. The sounds of commerce and strife are muffled by the fluffy white padding. The beasties are forced by circumstance to stay inside, comforting themselves with the warmth that silent whiteness doesn’t contain.

I no longer want to play in the snow. Or, maybe I do, but the physical limitations of age push that desire away so that I don’t notice it. But what I have noticed since childhood is that it feels glorious to come inside from the cold, the wind, the wet, the frozen. The feeling of relief and gratitude for a moment’s safety and warmth is something that humans and animals share. It feels safe and protected. Warmth is a womb in the danger of the frozen.

I hope that everyone in the world has a feeling of heart warmth and safety this night. I hope that the morning brings all alive to the joy of rebirth into the possibilities of a new day. I hope that possibilities are visible, if not to the eye then to the heart.

If Christmas day brings you any joy at all, please take a quiet moment, just a fleeting moment is enough, to say inside yourself, may all God’s creatures know this feeling I have right now.

Merry Christmas to you and God bless us, every one.