A few years ago, I realised my youngest child had never seen this film, so I decided to sit all the children down to watch it on Christmas Day. The older children weren't that interested in it, but reluctantly sat down too. As you know the boy, James, creates the snowman, which magically comes to life – at which point one of the older children turned to the youngest and said “He melts at the end!”
That put a bit of a dampener on it! But in some ways it was a very insightful comment on the film, because The Snowman is not a film about the joy and magic of Christmas, it is actually a film about death. Raymond Briggs, who created the story, said that the story was designed to introduce children to the concept of mortality.
Briggs himself struggled with his grief. He was an only child and his parents died from cancer just nine months apart in 1971, and his wife died from leukaemia just two years later. Briggs was still grieving when he created The Snowman a few years after. He is quoted as saying “The snowman melts, my parents died, animals die, flowers die. Everything does. There’s nothing particularly gloomy about it. It’s a fact of life.”
We all have different journeys of grief, but part of that journey must involve coming to terms with the reality and finality of death. The person we loved is no longer with us, they have gone and we are parted from them. At the end of the film, the snowman has melted and all James is left with is the scarf and his memories.
The same is true for us, when a loved one dies, all we are left with is some physical objects that are linked with them and our memories of them. Today we have another opportunity to recall those memories we have.
However, although memories are good, it is not helpful to say that our loved ones live on in our memories – that places an incredible and impossible burden on us. Our loved ones do not die if we forget to think about them because they are dead already. Remembering them is good, but not remembering them is OK too.
The Snowman ends with James kneeling in the snow, holding the scarf, distraught at the death of his friend. There is no happy ending. Death has the final say.
In his letter to the Corinthian church, the apostle Paul says “If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.” Christians believe in the resurrection, in the possibility of life after death, but if there is no such thing as life after death, if death does indeed have the final say, then Christians are fooling themselves and are in a worse position than those who don't believe in an afterlife at all.
But, Paul says, Jesus has been raised from the dead and those who belong to him, those who have a true and lively faith in him, will also share in that resurrected eternal life. And when Jesus returns, he will reign and destroy death itself. Death doesn't have the final say. Jesus does.
In The Snowman, Raymond Briggs presents us with the truth that death is a reality and has a finality to it. But this is only a partial truth. One of the reasons we celebrate Jesus' birth is because through his life, death and resurrection he defeats the hold that death has on us. Without him, death wins and we are lost forever. With him, life wins and those who belong to Jesus will live forever.
