'Light' white Christmas in cards for Saturday

It may not be a classic white Christmas with a cascading snowfall, but there will be at least a little snow Saturday to make the Nevada and Fort Scott areas more festive.

And considering the problems that heavy snow can cause, that may be the best outcome, a National Weather Service meteorologist said Thursday.

"There are two definitions of a white Christmas -- either have an inch of snow on the ground or have it snowing on Christmas Day," said NWS forecaster Mike Griffin of Springfield. "Saturday should bring a dusting of snow like we had on Dec. 11.

"We're looking at a mix of light, freezing rain, sleet and snow late tonight and early Friday with light snow all afternoon Friday acccumulating to maybe an inch during occasional flurries Saturday. It'll be cold at 34 degrees Friday, 27 Friday night, 33 Christmas Day and 20 that night. It will be 31 degrees under sunny skies Sunday and 16 Sunday night."

Griffin said the weekend snow covering will be mostly on grassy areas. "It won't be a crippling system, but it will cause problems on bridges and overpasses," he said.

"The ground is cold enough for whatever falls to stick around through Christmas. Light snow flurries on Christmas Day will give a festive look."

Griffin said colder mid-week weather swooped into the Heartland on the frosty wings of a Canadian front in advance of precipitation from the Pacific front that had brought heavy rains and flooding to California, weakening as it rumbled east.

It's apparent from the changed emotional atmospherics around the holidays that something is in the air, and the Rev. Hubert Fox of Nevada's First Baptist Church said Thursday that there is a spiritual relevance. "We may get caught up in the commercialism, but we should stop and ask ourselves why we're doing this and why we're so caught up in it," he said.

"The reason we buy gifts for people is to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ and the fact that God gave us the gift of his son. When my wife Ann and I were missionaries in Thailand from 1963-'98, we had Christmas in our home with our two children the same as we do now. We remembered family and growing up in Nevada during our years away in a foreign culture where Christmas was by and large overlooked."

Fox, First Baptist's associate pastor for senior adults, said more than 200 people took part in the church's annual Hanging of the Greens to decorate the sanctuary and sing carols Nov. 28, and a good crowd attended the choir's performance of Handel's "Messiah" Dec. 12, when choir director Wes Morton sang the tenor lead.

"We've been having a special emphasis on Christmas every Sunday night since the Hanging of the Greens," he said, noting that he spent the first 10 years of his rural evangelism mission in south Thailand and the next 20 teaching at a seminary in Bangkok.