Stories Behind Carols: Dec. 25/11

“Sing in Exultation”
Dec. 25/11

Stories behind "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing!", "Joy to the World", "It Came Upon the Midnight Clear", "Silent Night" and "Good King Wenceslas" (with a brief look at the Bowie/Crosby "Little Drummer Boy").

I used to know someone who would object to calling "Jingle Bells" "Winter Wonderland" etc. Christmas carols, because she understood that term to refer orignally to songs about the birth of Jesus and also presumably "Joy to the World", but I'll get to that later.

However, if I understood her correctly, it was actually the term "carols" not the word "Christmas" that she believed should always have a Nativity connection. But I think she is mistaken, in terms of original useage. As you'll hear shortly, according to etymology, that is, the origin of words, not its current useage, one could argue that the term Christmas carol should be reserved only for the songs of this season which have a good beat and can be danced to.

But not so much this kind of dancing [demonstrate tame shuffling] which some of us use at weddings & anniversaries, but more a circle dance, as is done around European May Poles or by Jewish people. Arguably, the quiet or solemn songs about Christ's birth are the least suited for the term “carol". But that's if we only go by etymology and refuse to acknowledge current useage, which I don't really recommend.

Adapted from Stories Behind the Christmas Carols By Mary Dawson

In their earliest beginnings, carols really had nothing to do with Christmas – or even with Christianity, for that matter.

The melodies were originally written for ancient circle dances associated with fertility rites and pagan festivities in the Celtic countries of Europe. As the Christian Church established itself in these areas, the familiar melodies and rhythms of carols found their way into Christian celebrations.

But because the songs had such pagan roots, the Church was uneasy about them for long time. In fact, a Church Council in the mid-Seventh Century explicitly forbade Christians to sing carols, and the Church continued to frown on carols well into the Twelfth Century.

As the austerity of medieval Christianity began to soften, carols merged with folk songs. History credits Francis of Assisi with bringing about a new interest in the feast of the Nativity. The priests in St. Francis’ order developed a style of religious folk song called a lauda. Laudas had happy, joyful dance rhythms that were so catchy that the song form soon spread across Fourteenth Century Europe.

The religious lauda got mixed together with a popular pagan custom called wassailing, in which people sang from door to door to drive away evil spirits and drank to the health of those they visited. What evolved from the marriage of wassailing and the lauda was the custom of caroling.

In the 17th century the Parliament of Puritan-ruled England decided to abolish Christmas altogether! It took several dark and gloomy decades before the prohibition against carol singing was lifted and people again began to write and sing carols freely. The popularity of the carol increased rapidly throughout the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, and it was during this time that many of our favorites were created.

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“Hark! The Herald Angels Sing!”

This brings us to our first Carol Story and to one of the most prolific songwriters of all time. His name is Charles Wesley, the brother of John Wesley the founder of Methodist churches. During Charles’ lifetime, he wrote over 600 songs! One of his most famous lyrics is Hark, the Herald Angels Sing, which many theologians say is the entire Gospel of Christ in one song.

The melody for this familiar carol was composed by the famous Felix Mendelssohn almost a hundred years after Wesley wrote the text. But how did the words and music come together?

The little known fact is that neither Charles Wesley nor Felix Mendelssohn would have wanted this music to be joined with these words. Mendelssohn, a Jew, had made it very clear that he wanted his music only to be used for secular purposes.
Charles Wesley, on the other hand, had requested that only slow and solemn religious music be coupled with his words.

However, in the mid Nineteenth Century, long after they both were dead, an organist named Dr. William Cummings, joined the joyous Mendelssohn music with Wesley’s profound words to create the carol we know and love today!

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“Joy to the World”
By Lindsay Terry, author of The Sacrifice of Praise: Stories Behind the Greatest Praise and Worship Songs of All Time (Integrity).

One of our most popular Christmas carols is the result of the efforts of Isaac Watts and Lowell Mason—and, some believe, George Frederick Handel. Watts was a frail, quiet man only five feet tall. Mason was an energetic publisher, choir director, and composer. Handel was a large, robust musical genius. Handel and Watts were contemporaries in London and one imagines they must have appreciated each other’s talents. Mason lived 100 years later in Boston.

In 1719 Isaac Watts, already a notable scholar and author, sat down under a tree at the Abney Estate near London and began to compose poetry based on Psalm 98. Watts had begun writing verses as a small child. In his teen years he complained that the songs in church were hard to sing. His father said, “Well, you write some that are better.” And so he did. For the next two years, young Isaac wrote a new hymn each week. He would eventually write more than 600 of them, all based on Scripture.

Today, hymns like “Alas! and Did My Savior Bleed” and “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross” are hallmarks of the Christian church, and Watts is regarded as “the Father of English Hymnody.” And, of course, teenagers now complain about his songs. That's just the way it goes.

Watts’ approach to paraphrasing the psalms differed from those before him, in that he deliberately put a Christian twist on them not there in the original, or likely in the human mind of David, Asaph etc.. Because of his belief in the inspiration of the same Holy Spirit who later gave us fuller revelation in the New Testament, he didn’t consider it improper to read these concepts into the Old Testament, though they had not been expressed clearly at that time.

In 1741 George Frederick Handel was already famous as the composer of several operas and oratorios. But, after prayer, he laboured almost continuously for 23 days on scriptures selected by a wealthy landowner, Charles Jennens. This resulted in the oratorio “Messiah”, now a Christmas tradition, although it describes also the crucifixion, resurrection and return of Christ.

Almost a century later, Lowell Mason set Watts’s poem of “joy” to music. For years it was assumed that Mason used tunes from Handel’s Messiah deliberately, but the truth of that claim is now debated among scholars. Listeners can judge for themselves.

But this we know: It was Mason who ultimately brought the pieces together to give us “Joy to the World.”

However, note that aside from the reference to the Lord coming, this song does not describe the birth of Christ, but is simply a paraphrase of Psalm 98. To the extent that this psalm is at all prophetic of the Messiah, it is like other passages in the OT, only half-fulfilled. Verse 2 describes the Lord making known His salvation which we can see fulfilled in the First Advent of Christ, but the description of the coming judgement in the last verse, suggests to me that this psalm and this song in their completeness are best suited to a celebration of Christ’s Second Advent.

Be that as it may, when we sing it, we hear the Nativity in it, which is fine – as long as we do not overlook its proclamation of Christ’s future coming in Glory.

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"It Came Upon the Midnight Clear"

An fascinating aspect of the stories of carols, or in fact of hymns in general such as we sing here, is the wideness of the the theological background of their writers, ie the various denominations of the Church of Christ Universal throughout history which are represented, and in some cases, possibly even groups or individuals outside of Christianity itself.

This morning we’ll sing the works of Roman Catholics, British Anglicans and their American version, Episcopalians, English non-Conformist Protestants, Methodists, and, as we’ve heard, in one case, against his wishes, a Jew.

And in this case, a Unitarian minister, Edmund Sears, and so, though we don’t often use this word, one from a heretical group, in terms of historical, Nicene Trinitarian Christianity, which I do believe is Apostolic & Biblical, one that denies, or at least doesn’t affirm, the Deity of Jesus of Nazareth.

And, when you look at the words, of “It Came Upon the Midnight Clear” again you don’t see much in terms of the Nativity Story, or the same kind of emphasis on Christ as in Wesley’s work, though there is the reference to “the Prince of Peace, their King”.

But this is interesting, because in terms of his Unitarian background, Sears himself was opposed to the more radical, liberal elements in his church, and was quite warmly Christ-centred in his views, almost Evangelical. He just wasn’t willing to express the relationship of Christ and the Father in the precise words of received orthodoxy at the time. In some ways he was something of a heretic in Christianity and in Unitarianism.

That didn’t make him a bad guy, or a dangerous member of society, and, if He trusted in the goodness of Christ on His behalf for the forgiveness of His sins, I am not the one to say that he – along with many other heretics – will not be in the Eternal Kingdom. I believe, thank God, that there will be many heretics in the Kingdom.

It’s not that I think we can be lazy about truth and falsehood, and that we need not strive always to believe in what is true, AND act on it, but good gifts, such as this song, can come from many different sources, and we can receive them as gifts of God’s unbounded grace.

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“Silent Night” from the Silent Night Society via wikipedia.

The original lyrics of the song "Stille Nacht" were written in Oberndorf bei Salzburg, Austria, by the priest Father Joseph Mohr and the melody was composed by the Austrian headmaster Franz Xaver Gruber. In 1859, John Freeman Young (an American Episcopalian Bishop in Florida) published the English translation that is most frequently sung today. The version of the melody that is generally sung today differs slightly from Gruber's original, which was a sprightly, dance-like tune in 6/8 time, as opposed to the slow, meditative lullaby version we know.

The carol was first performed in the Nikolaus-Kirche (Church of St. Nicholas) in Oberndorf on December 24, 1818.

Mohr had composed the words two years earlier but on Christmas Eve brought them to Gruber and asked him to compose a melody and guitar accompaniment for the church service.

In his written account regarding the composition, Gruber gives no mention of the specific inspiration for creating the song. According to the song's history provided by Austria's Silent Night Society, one supposition is that the church organ was no longer working so that Mohr and Gruber therefore created a song for guitar.

It is not clear whether the story you know of the broken organ is the historical reason that it was first played on guitar. Some believe that Mohr simply wanted a new Christmas carol that he could play on his guitar.

The Silent Night Society says that there are "many romantic stories and legends" that add their own details to the known fact Christmas truce of 1914 was a series of unofficial ceasefires that took place along the Western Front around Christmas of that year, during the First World War. Through the week leading up to Christmas, parties of German and British soldiers began to exchange seasonal greetings and songs between their trenches; on occasion, the tension was reduced to the point that individuals would walk across to talk to their opposite numbers bearing gifts.

On Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, many soldiers from both sides – as well as, to a lesser degree, from French units – independently ventured into "No man's land", where they mingled, exchanging food and souvenirs. As well as joint burial ceremonies, several meetings ended in carol-singing.

The truce is seen as a symbolic moment of peace and humanity amidst one of the most violent events of modern history. It was not ubiquitous, however; in some regions, fighting continued throughout the day, whilst in others, little more than an arrangement to recover bodies was made.

The following Christmas, a few units again arranged ceasefires with their opponents, but to nothing like the widespread extent seen in 1914; this was, in part, due to strongly worded orders from the high commands of both sides prohibiting such fraternisation.

There is a certain sad beauty to this story of Germans and English singing Silent Night together in the midst of war, but we do have to remember that the next day they went back to shooting and bayoneting one another. In the trenches of both armies were men who identified themselves with Christ, some perhaps in a merely nominal way, others perhaps in a more heart-felt way.

Their governments had their agendas of power and politics, and thousands of individuals who understood little to nothing of these lost their lives and took lives at the command of their authorities.

I have no easy answers that could have stopped this tragedy either in 1914 or in 2012.



I was listening yesterday to the David Bowie/Bing Crosby version of “The Little Drummer Boy” to which these lyrics were added:,

Peace on Earth, can it be
Years from now, perhaps we'll see
See the day of glory
See the day, when men of good will
Live in peace, live in peace again.

That was 1977. And things have not changed much since then!

However, we can -- and must -- resolve, I believe, to be peace-makers in our day-to-day lives with those around us, but not just avoiding being trouble-makers, but more actively seeking to contribute to what brings healing and corrects injustices in our families, our neighbourhoods, our society, and in our big Human Village.

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Good King Wenceslas whychristmas.com

Some of you know that as I grew up hearing Good King Wenceslas, I thought that “the feast of Stephen” was another way of saying, “the field of Stephen” and that the king looked out upon a snowy field, belonging to someone named Stephen, and spotted the poor man there. The Feast of Stephen is held Dec. 26th to commemorate the martyrdom of St. Stephen.

This carol was written in Victorian Britain by John Mason Neale to a traditional folk tune. The story itself is about the King (or Duke) of Bohemia (now part of the Czech Republic) AD 907 - 935, seeing peasants, on Dec. 26, from his castle and taking food and wood to them. The story in the carol was probably completely made up! In fact the real story of Wenceslas is rather gory!

Wenceslas' father was the Duke of Bohemia and a Christian but it's thought that his mother was a pagan. His father died when he was 12 and, as he was not old enough to become Duke until he was 18, his mother took control of the land as regent. During this time his grandmother, Ludmilla, brought Wenceslas up as a Christian.
It's thought that His mother had Ludmilla banished to a distant castle where she was murdered by the Queen's guards!

Wenceslas was still a Christian after this and learnt to read and write, something that was unusual for even a King/Duke in those days! He had local Bishops smuggled in at night to teach him the Bible. When he reached 18, Wenceslas took control of his dukedom. Legend says that he banished his mother and her pagan followers from his castle.

Wenceslas put in a good education system and a successful law and order system, so the parts of the carol story about him being a good King could be seen as true!

When Wenceslas was 22, his brother Boleslav, plotted (possibly with the pagan followers of their mother) to kill Wenceslas. Boleslav invited Wenceslas to celebrate a saint's day with him, but on the way to the Church, Wenceslas was attacked and stabbed to death by three of Boleslav's men.

The story told in the song was written by a Czech poet Václav Alois Svoboda in 1847. He wrote many 'manuscripts' that tried to prove that Czech literature was much older than it really was. The Poem found its way into the UK in the 19th Century where JM Neale put the translated words to the tune of a 13th century spring carol 'Tempus Adest Floridum' ('It is time for flowering') that came from a collection of old religious songs published in 1582 in Sweden/Finland!