“Jesus, Make It Warm”: A 4-Year-Old Snow Shoveler in the 2014 Cold Wave

Holding a blue snow shovel, a four-year-old boy shouts a four-word prayer that many adults were thinking in the long winter of 2014: “Jesus, make it warm!” The short family video was posted on YouTube in early February 2014 and quickly spread through news sites as North America struggled through one of its coldest winters in years.

The “Jesus Make It Warm” video

The clip is as simple as family videos get: a small boy, a shovel and a lot of snow. He decides it is too cold to play outside and turns his frustration into a loud prayer for warmer weather. The Christian Post covered it on 7 February 2014, describing a boy who would rather have grass, sunshine, April showers and May flowers. Three days later Richmond station WTVR shared it as more winter weather headed for Central Virginia.

The video was uploaded by TAE3710. Its charm is the boy’s total sincerity. He is not joking; he has had enough, and he takes the problem straight to the top.

Explore more: a Newfoundland family’s snowy doorway; a horse enjoying an unusual snowfall.

Video: “Jesus Make It Warm!” (published by TAE3710).

The polar vortex winter of 2014

The boy had good reason to complain. The early 2014 North American cold wave began on 2 January, when a sudden warming high in the stratosphere broke down the polar vortex, the band of frigid air that normally circles the Arctic. Lobes of Arctic air spilled south into Canada and the United States, and the jet stream dipped with them. The cold returned again and again until late March.

Record cold across North America

• On 6 January 2014, Babbitt, Minnesota, recorded −38 °C (−37 °F), and Chicago O’Hare fell to −27 °C (−16 °F).
• Winnipeg reached −37 °C the same day, and Toronto dropped to −22 °C.
• On 7 January, Central Park in New York City fell to −16 °C (4 °F), and even Atlanta saw −14 °C (6 °F).
• In the first week of March, 18 US states set cold records.

About 200 million people across the two countries felt the cold. Airlines cancelled around 20,000 flights after the first storm, schools closed across Minnesota and Ohio, and economic losses were estimated at about $5 billion.

Frozen Great Lakes and a long, cold February

By late winter about 91% of the Great Lakes were covered in ice, the second-highest share on record, and the last ice did not melt until early June, the latest date ever recorded. February was bitter too. Green Bay had its third-coldest February and Minneapolis–St. Paul tied for its seventh-coldest. For a four-year-old with a shovel, spring must have felt very far away.

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