It’s Christmas Eve…is it snowing where you live? Are you going to have a white Christmas? 

Chances are that you’re not thinking, “What strange questions!” We have been conditioned to desire a white Christmas. Conditioned by what? There’s certainly nothing biblical about it! And it wasn’t all that long ago that no one cared. But they do now…

Irving Berlin was born in Russia in 1888, and his family moved to New York in the mid-1890s. While visiting Southern California, he wrote White Christmas, which appeared in the 1942 movie Holiday Inn with Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye. When Irving Berlin wrote the song he told his secretary:  

I want you to take down a song I wrote over the weekend. Not only is it the best song I ever wrote, it’s the best song anybody ever wrote.

Bing Crosby’s recording remains the best-selling single record of all time. It’s the opening song on my Christmas CD, Ewell-tide Carols!  

We usually sing only the chorus, but the opening stanza is clear what the song is about–not that there should be a snowy Christmas everywhere, but that he’d like to be where it does snow at Christmas:

But it’s become the wish of Americans that they experience a white Christmas. The National Weather Service actually has an official criterion for it:   

A white Christmas is defined as having 1 inch or more of snow on the ground Christmas morning. https://www.weather.gov/dvn/ChristmasSnow

All because of a song. Make no mistake: music is very powerful, and it’s one of the great gifts that our creator God has given us. Another thing to be thankful for!

Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change. (James 1.17, ESV)

Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation? …Who marked off its dimensions? …On what were its footings set, or who laid its cornerstone—while the morning stars sang together and all the angels shouted for joy? (Job 38.4 – 7, NIV, emphasis mine)