DOWN HOME: Frosty the Snowman says: Mail your tithe

Raise your hand if cold weather makes you dread getting out of bed in the morning.

OK, slap the snooze button and put that hand back under the covers before you get frostbite.

The other day, I read a news story that claimed 2010 was the warmest year on record. I had a hard time reading because I was shivering so hard I could hardly focus on the words.

Global warming or not, it’s been a cold one lately, hasn’t it? An app on my phone shows the current temperature in just about any place I want to check. From my phone, I can monitor the thermometers in most of the places I’ve lived, like Perryton, my boyhood home, and Coppell, where we live now, along with Abilene, where we went to college, and Nashville, Tenn., and Louisville, Ky. For grins, I’ve also pinpointed Bar Harbor, Maine, and Lahaina, Hawaii—just about as far apart as you can get and still remain in the good ol’ U.S. of A. The other morning, it was colder in Coppell than Bar Harbor. Go figure.

As a kid, I loved cold weather. That’s a good thing for a boy growing up in the Texas Panhandle. I remember times when I would leave school after sports class, right out of the shower, and my hair would freeze solid before I could scrape the ice off the windows of my old jalopy. (All right, look at my picture over there to your left. So that’s what happened.)

Back then, I always figured cold beat hot, since you could put on more clothes to warm up in the winter, but you couldn’t take off enough clothes to cool down in the summer.

Of course, what did I know? In those days, I also loved extreme weather, particularly if it had anything to do with snow. I always dreamed of a white Christmas. And blizzards were on my list of favorite things. After all, what could be better than a cataclysmic event that simultaneously cancelled school and turned the great outdoors into a white-out playground?

Snow still brings out the kid in me, as it probably does for lots of folks. Something about the transformation of the dreary brown-gray landscape into a universe of dazzling white. All that, and—if the snow is sufficiently deep—a divinely induced spontaneous Sabbath.

But the practical grownup in me prefers snow on the weekend. That way, it doesn’t interfere with the “real world” of work and deadlines and deciding whether to risk commuting alongside several million friends and neighbors who did not grow up in the Panhandle and do not know how to drive on snow and ice.

My preacher friends don’t share my feelings, however. They know 19 snowflakes will keep 20 Baptists away from church. And if 20 Baptists stay home, at least 16 of them aren’t likely to send in their tithes and offerings.

So, if we get a weekend snowfall soon, treat your inner kid to a snowball fight. Then send the grownup back inside to mail your tithe.