"Hope for the future comes down in every tiny snowflake."

He gives snow like wool;

​​He scatters the frost like ashes;

 ​​He sends out His word and melts them;

​​He causes His wind to blow, and the waters flow.

Psalm 147: 16,18

“For He says to the snow, ‘Fall on the earth’;

Likewise to the gentle rain and the heavy rain of His strength.”

Job 37:6

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The heavens were gray and dull and low,

The earth was old and stained and sere,

When God outspread His spotless snow, ~

A carpet for the coming year.

Above it, sunshine came again,

Beneath it, many a weary thing

From summer heat and autumn rain

Found rest, and waited for the spring.

Lord, I am clouded like the air,

And withered like the flower and sod;

Oh! spread o’er all my sin and care,

Like snow, the perfect peace of God

Within its folds I still shall feel

The sun above, the growth below;

And the new springtime shall reveal

What things were nourished by the snow.

Then peace shall meet to joy and praise

And o’er the fruitful gardens blow,

While heaven and earth one chorus raise

To Him who giveth sun and snow.

It is not only that the snow makes fair what was good before, but it is a messenger of love from heaven, bearing glad tidings of great joy. Hope for the future comes down in every tiny snowflake. The spring sun will mount higher and higher in the heavens; the sweet snow will sink down into the arms of the violets; and, at the word of the Lord, the earth shall come up once more, as a bride adorned for her husband.

GAIL HAMILTON

December is month of bitterness and mirth; for is it not the inaugural month of Winter and the sole month of Christmas?  Before Christ came it was only month of icy Winter fierce in onset of frost and snow and raging icy wind, but since His coming December, however angry its beginning, its ending has always been in a burst of laughter, wild, hilarious, all but universal…December is month of singing beyond rose-embowered June.  There is no mirth like Christmas mirth.  Never has there been since this old world was young such inextinguishable laughter as in the Merrie Christmas time…When December begins wild winds and spitting snow, shivering is in fashion even with sparrows and squirrels; and frosts nip you in fun or earnest, you can't figure which, and when Spring comes to you more as a myth than as a memory, when it seems as if the warm south wind never drowsed past you, and as if you never had heard the drone of bees and the click of the grasshoppers' wings or smelt the heavy odor of the milkweed and had never seen the swallow glass fair form in the quiet of the evening river.  All these things are past and remembered as if they had been seen in dreams, in happy dreams.

        When, O wonder! ~ when December is at its frozen noon and riot is king, all on a sudden mirth invades this spacious Winter and voice of man and woman, youth and maid, schoolboy and little toddling child, leaps to a song, and the icy church bells sing a carol and Christmas chimneys have radiant light and everybody hangs his stocking up…. anyhow December has been silenced of his boisterous good nature of the whole sweet world of happy hearts.  And unregenerate December himself learns a Christmas tune and sings with tempestuous mirth a melody, the burden of which I catch to be: "Merry Christmas, Peace on Earth, good will to men.  Christ is come and has changed my Winter into laughing Spring.  I am less December now than June.  My flowers are children's smiling faces and my birds' singing is the Christmas laughter of such hearts as have heard that in Bethlehem a Child is born and the angels sing and I, December of the frozen heart, have caught the angels' tune, 'Praise! Praise!' "

        December, myself will learn your tune.

WILLIAM A. QUAYLE

God’s Calendar