Christmas is over for many of us (discounting those who observe the Twelve Days, the Eastern Orthodox, and me [because my family’s gathering this weekend]). So perhaps it would be OK for me to vent a little about a Christmas pet peeve.

As you may have noticed, I’m pretty tolerant of Christmas observances (or so I imagine. Don’t correct me, please). I don’t bemoan the commercialization much, I don’t attack Santa Claus, I don’t denounce the Christmas tree as a heathen shibboleth. When it comes to colored lights I’m essentially a little kid, and it’s pretty easy to make me happy with a Christmas tree and chocolate.

But I have a few gripes, primarily in the music department.

I don’t mean the obvious stuff. I won’t go into that Christmas Shoes song they keep playing on Christian stations (kill me now!). I’ll pass by The Little Drummer Boy, making his racket to keep a new Mother and her Baby awake all night. I won’t even spend time on Santa Baby.

I want to go where a deeper problem is. I want to single out a beautiful, well-written carol which I love, and which seems to me slightly insidious.

The carol is It Came Upon the Midnight Clear, by Edmund Sears:

It came upon the midnight clear,

That glorious song of old,

From angels bending near the earth,

To touch their harps of gold:

“Peace on the earth, goodwill to men,

From heaven’s all-gracious King.”

The world in solemn stillness lay,

To hear the angels sing.

Still through the cloven skies they come,

With peaceful wings unfurled,

And still their heavenly music floats

O’er all the weary world;

Above its sad and lowly plains,

They bend on hovering wing,

And ever o’er its Babel sounds

The blessèd angels sing.

Yet with the woes of sin and strife

The world has suffered long;

Beneath the angel-strain have rolled

Two thousand years of wrong;

And man, at war with man, hears not

The love-song which they bring;

O hush the noise, ye men of strife,

And hear the angels sing.

And ye, beneath life’s crushing load,

Whose forms are bending low,

Who toil along the climbing way

With painful steps and slow,

Look now! for glad and golden hours

Come swiftly on the wing.

O rest beside the weary road,

And hear the angels sing!

For lo!, the days are hastening on,

By prophet bards foretold,

When with the ever-circling years

Comes round the age of gold

When peace shall over all the earth

Its ancient splendors fling,

And the whole world give back the song

Which now the angels sing.

Perhaps it’s part of the curse I’ve borne from childhood, but I’ve always been a memorizer of hymns. I like to have them in my head, for handy reference. Christmas carols were particularly useful over the years, at least back in the days when I sometimes found myself in groups of carolers. I was the guy who knew the lyrics, and the others could usually follow along once I’d started a line.

So I’ve thought about It Came Upon the Midnight Clear for many years. And I grew suspicious quite early that this carol didn’t belong with most of the other religious carols. You may note that in the version printed above (which is the original, according to Wikipedia), there is not a single mention of Jesus Christ. Some revisions (the one we Lutherans use, for instance), change part of the last verse to read, “When the new heaven and earth shall own / the Prince of Peace their King…” But that’s not what Edmund Sears had in mind. He wanted to sing about angels, and just angels.

Sears was Unitarian minister, you see. I have no access to his actual intentions, but I have to assume that as a Unitarian he found all this talk about the Incarnation and the Atonement a distraction. The important thing, in his view, was Christian ethics. The angels sang about “peace on earth, goodwill to men.” For him (one assumes) that was the true meaning of Christmas.

This opinion has gained ground since his time, alas.

So although I love the song and enjoy hearing and singing it, I have deep reservations about it.

And now I’ve shared them with you.

No need to thank me.

It’s a little like the “hymn,” Once To Every Man and Nation, based on a poem by James Russell Lowell. Wonderful bit of poetry. Very stirring.

But it’s not about Jesus. It’s about politics.

Merry Christmas.