The little grandboys enjoy turning on the switch for the tiny lights inside each building. When the weather outside is “frightful,” well, inside, it’s just delightful! Especially if their papa pulls a carton of ice cream out of the freezer and they have a “guy treat”!
I spent part of my life in southern California where there’s no “white Christmas.” Most of my life has been in central Washington, where there likely is. And when those flakes do come, usually after several weeks of bone-chilling cold—there’s a special sense of peace as they cover up all that is dead and ugly.
Maybe that’s the charm of the little pretend towns. They invite us into a tiny world where there are no slums, crime, war, or sorrow….
It certainly doesn’t look like it did 2,000 years ago, but photos and songs about Bethlehem stir a similar yearning—to have been there when Jesus was born, to sense there would be light in the darkness. That was something of the impression left on an American minister named Philips Brooks. In 1865, as a young man, he visited Bethlehem’s “Church of the Nativity” for a Christmas eve service, and never forgot it.
A few years later, back home in America—more specifically to Holy Trinity Church in Philadelphia where his huge (6-foot-6, 300 pounds) body filled the pulpit—this well-known pastor wanted a children’s hymn for the Christmas Sunday school program. He came up with the lyrics and gave them to his Sunday school superintendent, Lewis Redner, asking the man to come up with a tune for them simple enough for children to sing. Nothing seemed “right” as Redner struggled with music. Then the night before the program, Redner woke with a tune in his mind. He wrote it down immediately, always later insisting that Heaven gave him the tune. It’s been a favorite of children and adults since.
Brooks was a lifelong bachelor who had a distinguished career as a pastor in Philadelphia and Boston, then a short term as Bishop of Massachusetts, before his death at 58. It’s said he loved children and kept toys in his office so children would feel free to come and visit with him. In this, his only known hymn, you hear his awe of the incarnation, and his tender heart:
How silently, how silently, the wondrous gift is giv’n!
So God imparts to human hearts the blessings of His heaven.
No ear may hear His coming, but, in this world of sin,
Where meek souls will receive Him still/ The dear Christ enters in.
“How silently”—an apt description of snow falling, and of the certain though quiet way we often sense the love of God.
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