In Defense of Snowmen

It’s New Year’s Day. As a kid, I noted it as the day Christmas ended. The music cut off on the radio, the lights went off around the neighborhood and, curiously, the snowmen came down all over, too.

No one will ever convince me rushing Christmas to end is a good idea. Even if non-religious, why not enjoy the beautiful lights and music at least for the traditional Twelve Days of Christmas of the church calendar instead of the abridged, eight days of Christmas to New Year’s?

Admittedly, I got really excited years ago, the first time someone pointed out to me that Candlemas was a good excuse to keep the Christmas season going until February 2. Even Epiphany on January 6 feels too abrupt.

The Scrooges who cut the lights on December 26 are an enigma to me. Christmas isn’t a flu to be recovered from. The twinkling lights captivate me today just as much as they did a week ago. Cultural as they may be, the trimmings of Christmas are beautiful.

The genuine heart of Christmas, the coming of the Savior, is far more important than the lights and baubles that come down. One would hope I’d say that, since I’m a pastor! I do say that and I do believe it.

I still enjoy those trimmings. After weeks of build-up, we finally hit a pinnacle of sparkling, beautiful scenes glimmering everywhere we can see. The music of joy reaches its crescendo. Then, thud.

Lights out.

When we reach the darkest time of year, merry and bright is perfect. I love the joyful music. All of it is wonderful to me and, in my aforementioned work, after Christmas Day is when I can take it in rather than seeing it in a blur of commotion.

Christmas music and anything else possibly used to hawk holiday buying is commercialized very early. Perhaps that explains why people have their fill by the time we arrive on New Year’s Day.

Fine. Truce on Christmas decoration removal, ok?

Let’s talk about snowmen. Here in St. Louis, we sometimes get snow in December. This year, Thanksgiving weekend brought a small accumulation of snow even a speck sooner. Those are the previews, no matter how much I might dream of a white Christmas. Big snows always come in January or February — or, maybe, March — if at all.

So, why do we take down snowman decorations, falling snow projector lights, snowy strings of lights and the like after Christmas? The first Christmas wouldn’t have even had any snow, at least in Bethlehem. Christmas and snow are distinct things, musical wishes notwithstanding.

Even granting wintery weather at Christmas in the Northern Hemisphere, is snow more inextricably linked with the Savior’s birth than leaves are with, say, Oktoberfest? Removing all the pumpkins and colorful foliage at the beginning of October would seem odd. Halloween? Thanksgiving? “Eh, just because they are in the prime fall color season, no reason to have the seasonally appropriate decorations up!”

The NIH estimates three million Americans are affected by seasonal affective disorder. Plenty more find the darkest, coldest days of winter at least a bit depressing. I never want to make light of serious forms of depression, but in the milder forms, I have to wonder: why wouldn’t we be depressed when we take down everything joyful and beautiful after “the most wonderful time of the year” and compound the harshest cold season with blandness?

Wouldn’t accenting January and February with something fun or happy help us all in the doldrums of winter? Put the snowmen up (or keep them up) this month — the inflatable yard decorations, the indoor table decorations, the works. Turn on the snowflake projectors. Deck the halls with snowy pine.

If orange and red hues can bedeck our entire autumnal journey, the lightest, most glistening and most cheerful parts of winter ought to be tasked to carry us the months beyond. That’s not being a flake who fails to keep up with taking decorations down, that’s just acknowledging we could all use a smile and a bit of light in the dark.

On the existential level, bringing light to the dark is what the Christmas miracle is all about. On a far more superficial level, though, snowmen and other winter decor post-Christmas not only make logical sense, they also brighten the pilgrimage toward spring.