“I’m an interpreter of stories. When I perform it’s like sitting down at my piano and telling fairy stories.” – Nat King Cole
Nat King Cole, the stage name of Nathaniel Adams Cole (1919-1965), has always been one of my favorite singers. He won a Grammy for “Midnight Flyer” and had 28 Top 40 hit songs. Mel Tormé and Bob Wells’s 1945 piece “The Christmas Song” is a Nat King Cole piece in my mind; I don’t care who else has sung it.
Cole also made famous a beautiful lullaby by Alfred Bryan and Larry Stock, “A Cradle in Bethlehem,” written in 1952.
This is the real meaning of Christmas: “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14 ESV).
This does not mean God posed as a man for a few years, casting an illusion on everyone in order to influence them with well-spoken sermons.
It does not mean God sent his spirit into a man for a time, having found someone who was sufficiently humble to indwell for divine purposes.
It does not mean that God actually is a man who lives eternally on another plane but for a season he came to Earth to do things.
It also does not mean that Jesus was only a man who connected dots like no one before him and introduced some darn good principles to Western civilization.
It does not mean that a uniquely spiritual man called on divine power to perform marvelous works and speak with wisdom beyond the scope of mortal reason.
Those ideas are a bit easier to understand. The truth is beyond us. Christ Jesus, born as a child to a poor, virgin woman, was the Word of God from the beginning, both with God and actually God. The invisible, eternal God became a mortal man. That doesn’t make complete sense to us, but it is the only hope for ourselves and all the world.
In a week, we will be set upon by Christmas. I hope you, your friends, family, and neighbors will receive God’s transforming grace to know with confidence what the Lord has done by taking on flesh and living as one of us.
The Christmas carol in this video, “A Virgin Unspotted,” used to be very popular and can be found in many variations. The music, “Judea,” was written by William Billings in 1778.
Billings was a tanner who taught himself music and was friends with men you know from the American Revolution. Britannica states, “His music is noted for its rhythmic vitality, freshness, and straightforward harmonies.” That’s what I love about this song. The joyous chorus that dances round the room.
The words come derive from a 1661 carol called “In Bethlehem City,” which appears in many versions and was originally paired with a tune that has been lost. The writers of Hymns and Carols of Christmas state, “The carol has appeared in one form or another in most of the old collections of songs, and was a popular subject for the broadside trade. Interestingly, it almost never appears in hymnals.”
I came to know the song through The Rose Ensemble album, And Glory Shown Around.
In pursuit of my mission to enlighten the world on Norwegian Christmas customs, I offer the clever TV commercial above, complete with English subtitles.
It will help your comprehension to know that the “nisse” is roughly what the English would call a brownie, or possibly a gnome. He is distinguished by his characteristic red cap. Every farm has at least one, and they control the farm’s luck. Get on his wrong side and he’ll sour the milk, sicken the livestock, sabotage the equipment, etc. My maternal grandmother’s father, according to my mother, blamed everything that went wrong on his farm on the smågubbe, the “little old man,” who was the same as the nisse (like the elves, they prefer it if you don’t use their name).
One matter of supreme importance in coexisting with the nisse is the Christmas porridge (julegrøt). The nisse expects to get a bowlful of the family’s Christmas porridge every Christmas Eve. You leave it out in the barn for him. He especially requires that a generous pat of butter be placed on top. Neglect that, and you can expect a very bad year. Sometimes it’s the farm owner’s fault, and sometimes the fault of a lazy servant. It makes no difference. The nisse must have his due. (I wonder who screwed up last Christmas.)
Tine is a popular brand of butter in Norway, and they did themselves proud with this charming and technically excellent ad, a few years back.
“Some children see him bronzed and brown, The lord of heav’n to earth come down; Some children see him bronzed and brown, With dark and heavy hair.”
I appreciate artwork depicting Christ Jesus as someone in a different ethnic context than he lived. I suppose that should go without saying, since we tend to understand Jesus of Nazareth did not look like the Romanized figure we most recognize. If we depict him in a painting at all, we’re going to depict him as we are.
Alfred Burt wrote the music to this Christmas carol for his family Christmas card in 1951, a tradition his father started in 1922. Alfred wrote fifteen such carols, including “The Star Carol” and “Caroling, Caroling.” You can see all of the cards and songs on this tribute page.
The carols were known primarily to those who received the cards until Burt was invited to the King Family Christmas party and introduced a various Hollywood people. That emboldened him to get enough material together for an album, which was released in 1954.
The King family was something of a big deal last century. I haven’t heard of them, but they sang as an ever-growing family for decades and had their own variety show in the mid-60s. In 1967, they put together a live Christmas special that offered viewers this special moment of a son returning from Vietnam while she sang of him on stage.
I posted this video of Sissel singing “Det Lyser i Stille Grender” the other day. Watch it if you missed it before, or watch it again; it’s worth it.
There’s one detail I wanted to comment on. That concerns the Christmas tree standing behind the singer. Note what they did with the shiny garlands.
In America, it’s customary to wind the garlands around the tree, top to bottom (or bottom to top, if you prefer; I’m not dogmatic on the point). The effect is similar to what snow looks like as it lays on the branches of an evergreen after a snowfall. But in Norway it’s common (though not universal) to arrange the garlands as you see here – hanging straight down from the star (or angel; again, I’m not dogmatic) at the top. The idea here (I believe) is to suggest the rays of the star shining down from Heaven. If you set a Nativity creche underneath, that works even better. I did a search for pictures of Norwegian Christmas trees, and often they look very much like ours, but I’ve rarely seen the star-ray configuration on an American tree.
Another difference is in the use of flags. A popular decoration in Norway is a garland of little paper Norwegian flags on a string. You arrange them on the tree as you would any other holiday garland. That sort of thing’s pretty much unknown in America, even in Republican households. We try to separate Church and State – but in Norway they had a State Church up until fairly recently. And the flag, after all, does feature a cross.
It’s common to deride American conservatives as flag-worshippers, but really the Norwegians have us beat on that point. Through the periods of agitation for independence under Denmark and Sweden, the display of a “pure” Norwegian flag (one not quartered with the flag of the “parent” country) was subversive, but relatively safe. During the Nazi occupation, having the flag was less safe, but that made it all the more precious. To this day, old people get tears in their eyes when they remember the day it was finally safe to display the flag again.
No doubt, as that generation dies off, this passion for the flag will diminish.
I’m pretty sure I’ve posted this number by Sissel here before (though not this performance, which conveniently includes subtitles). But it’s high on my list of Norwegian Christmas songs that deserve to be known outside the neighborhood.
According to this Norwegian account, the lyrics come from a poem by Jakob Sande. It was first published in 1931, but the author didn’t think much of it. When Lars Soraas, who was putting a Christmas songbook together in 1948, asked him for permission to use it, Sande had forgotten about it completely. Since then it’s become his best-known work.
I came to this lost letter between two tempters late this season. Justin Wainscott found it somewhere and offers it to us for the useful instruction it has. The senior tempter advises his pupil not to try to turn his charge against Christmas all together, but to weakness his reflection on any of the details.
Keep him distracted as much as possible. “Keep him overly committed to all sorts of things (yes, even good things). Make sure he goes to every party and feels obligated to go out and purchase a gift for each one. Make sure he attends concerts and dinners and charity events. If his calendar isn’t full, you’ve failed.”
Failing that, keep him sentimental. “By all means, let him sing and be merry. Hell knows we have made good use of those kinds of things just as much as we have misery and gloom.”
Failing that, he has one more suggestion, all of which make for good advice for the coming year.
The Sussex Carol from last year’s Baylor University Christmas concert, a great use of highland bagpipes. Heard on today’s episode of The World and Everything in It.
