Tag Archives: Christmas

Music, Religion

A Christmas hymn I love and hate

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I’ve been writing for this blog so long that I think I can probably reanimate some of my old post topics. A search of our archives shows that it was in 2010 that I last wrote about the Christmas hymn, “It Came Upon the Midnight Clear.” I’m not going to denounce it. In fact, I kind of love it. But it’s not really a Christmas hymn. It’s more of a Christmas song, like “The Christmas Song” (the Chestnuts one, you know) or “Silver Bells.” Because it’s not about Jesus, and was never intended to be.

The putative hymn was written by Edmund H. Sears, a sensitive-minded Unitarian minister who worked in Toledo for a while, before suffering a breakdown (perfectly understandable, under the circumstances). In time he ended up serving a church in Wayland, Massachusetts. He wrote “It Came Upon the Midnight Clear” in 1849, and it was published with a tune by Richard Storrs Willis in 1850. His motivation seems to have been his depression over the Mexican War, which raised considerable opposition in the country (Lincoln famously voted against the war, and lost his seat in Congress because of it).

The hymn goes:

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, good will 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 blessed angels sing.

But 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; –
Oh 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; –
Oh, 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.

Do you notice something missing in this so-called “Christmas Hymn?” It says nothing about Jesus. Not a word. You’ve got angels and peace, which hearken back to Luke’s account of the Nativity (verses 8-14):

And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid. And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord. And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger. And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying,

Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.

So you’ve got the angels and you’ve got the peace, demonstrating that the poet had Christ’s birth in mind. So why didn’t he mention Christ Himself?

Because he was a Universalist. He didn’t really think Jesus was that important. He believed Jesus simply represented a universal principle of peace and love, which gives us hope for a coming time (“the age of gold”) when Mankind will have evolved to the point of outgrowing war.

In many more orthodox hymnbooks, the words have been altered a little. The changed lyrics substitute “the time foretold” for “the age of gold.” And they say “the new Heaven and earth shall own the Prince of Peace their King,” instead of “when Peace shall over all the earth its ancient splendors fling.” I don’t generally care for meddling with original texts, but I like those changes just fine.

Still, the hymn still leaves me a little melancholy.

Beautiful, though.

I looked for a good video of the hymn/song to embed above. But everybody had to get cute with it one way or another (worst are the English, who use the wrong tune!). So I had to settle (yet again) for the Heretic Tabernacle Choir. Which is kind of appropriate, I guess.

Fiction

Mary Is Truly Wonderful in George’s Life

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Clare Coffey talks about the annual criticism people shovel at one of the best Christmas movies of all time, Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life. She said she could dismiss most of it as small-minded or stuck in its own bitter slough from which no reply could deliver. But one criticism, that of Mary’s role, seemed to stick. Why did Mary need George to save her from a single life? She was a vibrant young woman in her own right. If George hadn’t been around, she would have chosen another path for herself.

But after seeing the film on the big screen, Coffey noticed something that changed her mind.

The scenario that the counterfactual world presents us is explicitly foreshadowed by Mary’s playful, obviously ridiculous rejoinder, “to keep from being an old maid.” Once I realized this, it became my interpretive key to the problematic later scene.

From the beginning, it is Mary who chooses George, not the other way around. 

Uncategorized

‘There’s Something In the Barn’

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A Facebook friend alerted me to the movie trailer above. “There’s Something In the Barn.” It’s not one I worked on, nor have heard of it before. Not my kind of thing, really, but some of you might find it amusing. As I’ve often mentioned, I just don’t get horror. I think this springs from being a coward. It takes a braver person than I to enjoy being scared. Let alone to laugh about it.

The take on the “barn elf” here is an interesting one. One would never actually call them barn elves in Norway, I’m pretty sure. As mentioned in my novels, the Hidden Folk don’t like to be called by name. You call them the Good Neighbors, or the Little Old Men, or something like that. And, as the movie emphasizes, offending them is nothing to be undertaken lightly.

It’s basically a reversal on the sweet – but overly sentimental – picture offered in the classic commercial below, released by the Tine Dairy Products Company back in 2017:

You can make a good Christian argument that the horror version is more appropriate. The church traditionally has considered the Hidden Folk to be demons (probably).

There’s a theory that all horror is conservative. I’m not sure that’s true, but I think you can make a good case that Horror as a genre is conservative in its essence, if not in all its instantiations. (Instantiations is a lovely word I learned in Library School).

Got my tree decorated today. And I found a section in The Baldur Game that I think I’ll have to cut, or at least reduce to its bare bones. Like a victim in a horror story.

Music

Advent Singing: Veni, Veni, Emmanuel (O Come, O Come, Emmanuel)

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Our first hymn of the advent season is the Latin version of O Come, O Come, Emmanuel. These words have been traced to the eighth century when the medieval church chanted ‘O’ Antiphons during Vespers on the final days of advent. At least, that’s when they were established in church liturgy. There is a bit of evidence suggesting they were prayed or chanted before that. The tune we use is from a Requiem Mass in a fifteenth-century French Franciscan Processional.

The English words we’re familiar with come from Englishman John M. Neale in 1851. I have copied the words sung below the next video, showing a processional in the Basel Cathedral of Switzerland.

“Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel” (Isaiah 7:14 ESV).

Veni, veni Emmanuel;
Captivum solve Israel,
Qui gemit in exilio,
Privatus Dei Filio.

Refrain
Gaude! Gaude! Emmanuel,
Nascetur pro te, Israel!

Veni o Jesse virgula!
Ex hostis tuos ungula,
De specu tuos tartari
Educ, et antro barathri.
Refrain

Veni, veni, O Oriens;
Solare nos adveniens,
Noctis depelle nebulas,
Dirasque noctis tenebras.
Refrain

Veni, Clavis Davidica!
Regna reclude caelica;
Fac iter tutum superum,
Et claude vias inferum.
Refrain

Authors, Bookselling, Publishing

Christmas Books by Dickens and Thackeray

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I’d say most Americans who know anything about Charles Dickens know that he wrote A Christmas Carol and maybe something else, like The Oliver Twist and Shout. Something they won’t know (and I didn’t either) is that A Christmas Carol was only the first of Dickens’s Christmas tales, which he produced as the Christmas book market was changing with the publication of seasonal annuals.

Leaning again on Joseph Shaylor’s 1912 book on publishing and bookselling, A Christmas Carol was released a few days prior to Christmas Day 1843 for five shillings a copy. Due to his publisher’s waning faith, Dickens had to argue for this work to be its own book and agreed to pay all costs, his publisher receiving a commission. That wasn’t cheap. The original run of 6,000 books sold in a day, but Dickens earned only £250. Interest held for the following year, selling 15,000 copies and earning the author £726.

(For comparison, a solicitor’s clerk could earn 18-25 shillings/week, launderers 2 ½ shillings/day, female upholsters 9-11 shillings/week, and butlers £40-100/year. One pound is made of 20 shillings. Taken from The Dictionary of Victorian London)

By November 1844, Dickens had written The Chimes: A Goblin Story of Some Bells that Rang an Old Year Out and a New Year In, and it sold better than its famous predecessor. In 1845, Dickens released The Cricket on the Hearth, which reportedly sold twice as much as The Chimes did. Next, he released The Battle of Life in 1846, which doesn’t have a Christmas theme. No word on how well it was received, but Shaylor does describe it as the last of Dickens’s Christmas books “as it was found impossible to maintain the high standard that the first volumes had reached, and as the books were rather expensive.” The Spectator closed its 1846 review, saying, “The name of the writer, and the holyday disposition of people to spend their money, may circulate the book; but if this experiment upon the public be repeated, Mr. Dickens will find that a trade carried on without the requisite capital must come to a stop.”

Dickens took another swing at it with The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain in 1848. It reportedly sold 18,000 copies and made the author £800. (I wonder if he continued to bankroll their publication.)

Perhaps spurred by Dickens’s seeming success, William Makepeace Thackeray published Mrs. Perkins’s Ball with his own illustrations as an 1847 Christmas book, the same year Vanity Fair was released. He reportedly wrote a mock critical review of Mrs. Perkin’s Ball, ‘realizing’ midway through that he had written it himself. The success of this Christmas book encouraged him to release these titles in each of the following years: Our Street (1848), Doctor Birch (1849), Rebecca and Rowena (1850), and The Kickleburys on the Rhine (1851). The last book was advertised “to be ready on December 16, for the annual edification of Christmas parties” in illustrated editions for seven shillings, six pence, or without illustrations for five shillings.

An illustration by Thackeray from his book Mrs. Perkins's Ball.

“Grand Polka,” an illustration by Thackeray from Mrs. Perkins’s Ball (Wikimedia Commons Public Domain)

For a few Saturday links:

C.S. Lewis: Aaron Earls offers a passage from The Horse and His Boy as one that always makes him cry. I understand. I can still hear the voice of the reader of this passage from an LP I listened to repeatedly as a kid.

Wartime Christmas: Writing in 1915, Arthur Machen asks how we should handle celebrating Christmas during the Great War. “[W]e grown-ups, like the wealthy dealers, can look after ourselves in this matter of presents. It is the children that we should think of chiefly, and we should determine that no shadow of the war shall be allowed to spoil their Christmas.” He mentions puzzles at the end. I wonder what he would have thought of these marvelous wooden puzzles.

Utopia: Étienne Cabet and his 1840 Voyage en Icarie (Travels in Icaria), “was so popular and affecting that it led hundreds of French citizens to leave their homes and journey to the United States to realize the egalitarian paradise he had described.” As it fell apart, the author blamed the women.

Feature Illustration: Kyd (Joseph Clayton Clarke), “Character Sketches from Charles Dickens,” Wikimedia Commons Public Domain

Blogs, Socials, Bookselling, Writing

The Rise of Christmas Books in Britain

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Giving books at Christmas has been a long tradition with readers. In the early 19th century, plenty of books sold in the weeks preceding Christmas, but none of them were published for the season. Often people bought attractively bound collections of essays, poems, or classic novels that they knew they would enjoy.

In one of his books on the industry, publisher Joseph Shaylor writes, “Between 1820 and 1830 there came into existence a series of Annuals which caused quite a revolution in the sale of books for Christmas.” British bookman Rudolf Ackermann came up with the idea, publishing Forget-Me-Not: A Christmas and New Years Present for 1823. They were published every year through 1848, having a circulation of 18,000 at the height of its popularity.

Cover of 1823 annual, titled "Forget Me Not"

Another publisher released Friendship’s Offering in 1824, which found its way to America some years later as knockoff copies. Apparently, many volumes were hacked this way in America, even lesser works rebound and distributed under new popular titles (which sounds like clickbait to me). Friendship’s Offering may have published some higher quality literature than most. For example, Thomas Babbington Macaulay’s poem “The Armada” was printed in the 1833 edition. It ran until 1844.

Engraver Charles Heath launched multiple annuals, “such as the Picturesque Annual, in a guinea volume which contained engravings from the best landscape painters of the day,” and The Book of Beauty, edited by Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington and Irish novelist in her own right. Her social influence drew attention from many literary stars and would-be stars, including Disreali.

“The rise of the Annuals appears to have diffused a fashion for artistic and elegant pursuits, and helped to evolve a taste for literature and the fine arts. They were the principal publications of the year, and much time and consideration were given to their production.”

Booksellers have tried to inspire an Easter season of book-giving to no avail.

All right. What else we got?

Literary Translation: Joel Miller talks to Russian translator Lisa C. Hayden about the art of moving a novel into another language.

When it comes to translation choices, there’s not always a “right” choice, just the choice that seems best. How does literary intuition play into your work?

I rely a lot on intuition. It particularly kicks in when I’m reading the manuscript out loud. I’m listening for lots of things but particularly want to feel that there’s an ease to the reading and a rhythm to the writing. I know when they feel right but rarely know how to explain why they feel right.

Secular Morals: Seth Mandel writes the former director of Human Rights Watch “is what you’d get if Soviet ‘whataboutism’ were a person, a golem manifested by the chantings of Oberlin freshmen. . . . HRW and Amnesty International both had no idea how to handle a post-9/11 world because terrorism didn’t really fit into their worldview.”

Writing: “True ease in writing comes from art, not chance,
As those move easiest who have learned to dance.”

Books: “Books are men of higher stature, And the only men that peak aloud for future times to hear.” – Elizabeth B. Browning, “Lady Geraldine’s Courtship”

Reading, Religion

A hermit’s happy Christmas

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Photo credit: Laura Nyhuis, lauraintacoma, under Unsplash license.

I want to tell you about my Christmas, and I worry that I’ll do it badly. I’m susceptible (as you may have noticed) to the temptation to play the martyr, but in fact the tale I have to tell you is quite a happy one. I had a blessed Christmas.

My church is one of those that only did Christmas Eve services this year, so I went to that, and then Christmas Sunday lay before me unscheduled (my family will gather next weekend). It’s something of a challenge for a Christmas-lover like me to spend the big day by himself, but I prayed earnestly for a good spirit as I went to bed.

I woke up remembering a strange dream (as if I’ve ever had a dream that wasn’t strange). I was kneeling, studying a doll house. I was certain, for some reason, that there were tiny people living in that doll house. But I’d never seen them. They were shy and they kept out of sight, frightened, no doubt, by my size.

And as I thought about that dream, lying in bed, it occurred to me that this was a parable of Christmas. God faced a similar problem when He came into the world, and He solved it by becoming small, by becoming a baby.

I thought that a rather jolly way to wake up Christmas morning. It put me in an unexpectedly festive mood. Then, as I got up, I noticed how cold it was. Our natural gas company, worried about the gas supply (Gee, I wonder how that came to be a problem), had asked us to turn our thermostats down to 65⁰, and I’d done so, like a loyal Comrade. I remembered that I’ve got a nice, hand-knitted pair of wool stockings somewhere, which I hadn’t worn in a while. Seemed like a good day for them. I poked around in some drawers, and in the bottom bureau drawer I found, not the socks (I found those somewhere else), but a pair of flannel pajamas. I hadn’t worn those pajamas in years. I’d forgotten I owned them. When I contemplate my old clothes, the question is always, of course, “From which geological era of my life do these come?” I’ve been thin and I’ve been fat, and I still haven’t lost enough weight to wear the older stuff. But I tried the pj’s on, and they fit very well. I’d been wearing ordinary cotton pajamas, but it seemed to me flannel was just the thing for current conditions. It was like getting a Christmas present, so I decided to consider them one.

Through the rest of the day I took a break from my diet, considering it a Feast. I listened to Christmas music by Sissel. And I continued reading the book I was working on, Lewis’ Perelandra (which I mean to review tomorrow).

Perelandra, it seems to me, stands alone among Lewis’ works in a particular way. I think it’s the most fully mythopoeic of his books, most closely bound to Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, if only in spirit. Lewis was at the peak of his creative powers here, and he excelled at moving the heart by way of the intellect – I’ve read Perelandra several times, but this time was almost physically difficult for me. More than once I had to stop to regain my composure. Not because I didn’t like it, but because it pierced my heart again and again. So I was something of an emotional basket case on Christmas day.

But I wasn’t unhappy. In its peculiar way, this was one of the best Christmases I’ve ever spent.

Music

The Prince of Peace Has Come, Yet We Have Little Peace

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The Christmas concert my church choir performed this year featured Vivaldi’s Gloria. The video above is the second movement, “Et in Terra Pax,” performed by the Oxford Schola Cantorum and Northern Chamber Orchestra.

“Et in terra pax hominibus bonae voluntatis.”
And in earth peace to men of good will.

Vivaldi set these words to rather unpeaceful music. It has a dreadful plodding to it, as if we fear the coming of terra pax. Its slow tension is a beautiful metaphor for knowing the Prince of Peace has come and yet feeling our lack of peace throughout our lives. We long for the peace that has come, Lord. How long?

Of the increase of his government and of peace
  there will be no end,

on the throne of David and over his kingdom,

   to establish it and to uphold it

with justice and with righteousness

   from this time forth and forevermore.

The zeal of the LORD of hosts will do this. (Isaiah 6:7 ESV)

Music, Religion

‘Hark, the Herald Angels Sing’

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A blessed Christmas to all you Brandywinians out there. My own plans are to celebrate Christmas in my usual madcap way — a traditional Scrooge Christmas with a lowered thermostat, dim lights, a cup of gruel by the fire, and a chair set out for any wandering ghosts who might appear to accuse me.

Above, a clip I’ve probably posted before — Sissel with the Pelagian Tabernacle Choir, doing “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing,” my favorite Christmas hymn.

Music

Have Yourself a Sad Little Christmas Song

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Meet Me in St. Louis is a hit musical that gave us the song “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” performed in the video above. The movie was initially released in St. Louis November 1944 and nationwide January 1945. Judy Garland plays Esther Smith, the eldest of four daughters, who falls for a new boy in town, played by Tom Drake.

The context of the Christmas scene is their father having accepted a job transfer to New York, which would uproot the family right after Christmas. Esther is comforting little Tootie about the move and sings the melancholy song. But the songwriters originally leaned into the sadness more than Garland and the movie executives wanted. Classicfm has the story.

Here are some of the original lyrics:

“Have yourself a merry little Christmas.
It may be your last.
Next year we may all be living in the past.
Have yourself a merry little Christmas.
Pop that champagne cork.
Next year we may all be living in New York.”

The second version, which Garland sang, were revised again for Frank Sanatra, so you may hear the song conclude with “Until then we’ll have to muddle through somehow” or “So hang a shining star upon the highest bough.”

Either way, I hope you have yourself a, uh, you know.