Wolfgang A. Mozart; arr. Walter Ehret
Sing a song of Merry ChristmasWhen I was a kid, at this time of year, I heard the usual carols on the radio. Intermixed with them, however, in our house, we played Tom Lehrer albums. To some of you, I dare say, this will also be familiar – and for some of you, perhaps, not – after all, it’s been more than 65 years since Tom Lehrer’s Christmas Song was released. It goes, in part, like this:
Put care away this holiday.
Sing a song of Merry Christmas.
Put care away this holiday.
This is the time to sing Noel.
This is the time to sing Noel, Noel, Noel!
This is the time to sing a bright Noel, so
Sing a song of Merry Christmas,
a joyous song of Christmas --
Put care away this holiday.
Christmas time is here, by gollyThe holidays can be stressful. Christmas – and Hanukkah, too – have been so thoroughly Commercialized for so long now that we don’t even think to complain about anymore. It’s just how things are. The shopping and the preparations – maybe the travel, or the hosting of relations that travel to you: so much to do!
Disapproval would be folly
Deck the halls with hunks of holly
Fill the cup and don't say when
Hark, the Herald Tribune sings
Advertising wondrous things
God rest ye merry merchants
May ye make the Yuletide pay
Angels we have heard on high
Tell us to go out and – buy!
“Merry Christmas” we say. But it’s easy to find ourselves with no time for merriment. Our Choir’s opening song urged us to “Put care away this holiday.” I hope that’s possible. May you have time for merriment. May you have time to put care away this holiday.
As I looked over the five choir pieces for our Music Sunday, I noticed that there are two, in some ways opposite, ways to put care away this holiday. One of them is merriment, cheer, gaiety – a little bit rowdy, a little bit loud – a time for raucous belly laughs. But this is also a season for peace. To find the calm assurance of inner peace -- this, too, is putting care away – and relishing a calm and peaceful delight. Not the belly laugh, but the quiet smile.
Christmas is for both the boisterous and the peaceful. More on the boisterous side of Christmas, the next Choir piece is about Wassailing. Why do they call it wassail? Because it’s good for wassails ya. Actually, “wassail” comes from the Old Norse for “be healthy” – used as a drinking salutation, like, “to your health.” Nowadays, wassail denotes a beverage made from mulled cider, ale, or wine and spices. The verb wassailing has two traditions: there’s the house-visiting wassail, and the orchard-visiting wassail.
The orchard-visiting wassail comes from cider-producing regions of England. People would go to apple orchards and recite incantations and sing to the trees to promote a good harvest for the coming year. They called this wassailing.
The house-visiting wassail is the practice of people going door-to-door, shlepping an enormous wassail bowl with them, and singing and offering a drink from the wassail bowl exchange for gifts – traditionally, food, drink, or money. Both the house-visiting wassailers and the orchard-visiting wassailers were there to confer blessings – a blessing on the trees, in one case, and a blessing on the house, in the other case, to protect it from evil spirits.
I have seen carolers – and have even been a caroler – but I’ve never seen people actually wassailing – either the orchard-visiting kind or the house-visiting kind. At least, if they were carrying around a large bowl, I didn’t see it. I understand actual wassailing still goes on in western England and Wales. Americans: not so much. But we do like to sing about it. Wassailing has become, for most of us, a metaphor.
Our lives, lived day to day, are indeed a "wandring so fair to be seen" – as we traverse our days giving and receiving the blessings of life and companionship. And as we go through life, our interactions are a mix of marketplace transactions and nonmarket values. On the one hand, I’ll trade you a drink for some gift from you. There’s that transactional way of viewing it. On the other hand, there’s love and joy being shared – and the human bonds that transcend markets.
"Here We Come A-Wassailing"
Traditional English Carol; arr. Ryan O'Connell
Here we come a-wassailingChristmas is indeed heavy on the music. No other holiday is submerged in its music the way Christmas is. There are a few Easter songs – not many. For the 4th of July, we have a number of paeans to patriotism, but they don’t inundate the air the way that Christmas songs and carols do every December.
Among the leaves so green;
Here we come a-wand'ring
So fair to be seen.
Love and joy come to you,
And to you your wassail too;
And God bless you and send you
a Happy New Year
And God send you a Happy New Year.
We are not daily beggars
That beg from door to door;
But we are neighbours' children,
Whom you have seen before.
God bless the master of this house
Likewise the mistress too,
And all the little children
That round the table go.
Almost every recording artist feels the need at some point in their career to put out a Christmas album. Even Bob Dylan, bless his heart, put out one. I like Bob Dylan, but after hearing his Christmas album once, I have not wanted to hear it again. The record labels are not, however, cranking out Halloween albums, or Labor Day albums.
Think of all the Popular Christmas songs written in the 20th century: “Santa Claus is Coming to Town,” “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” “Frosty the Snow Man.” “All I want for Christmas is You,” “Winter Wonderland,” “Let it Snow, Let it Snow,” “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year,” “A Holly, Jolly Christmas,” “The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire,” “Silver Bells,” “Dreaming of a White Christmas.” New ones come out every year.
Those are fun. I like them. But in my mind the real Christmas Carols are the ones from the 19th Century. These are the ones that seem to me to get under the surface of Christmas and speak to a more fully resonant meaning. “Joy to the World,” “The First Noel,” “Silent Night,” “Do you hear what I hear?” “In the Bleak Midwinter,” “Deck the Halls,” “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing,” “Angels we have heard on high,” “It Came Upon the Midnight Clear” “O Little Town of Bethlehem” – you know – the ones in our hymnal. I mean, a 20th-century song like, for instance, “I’ll be home for Christmas,” may be catchy, and even kinda poignant, but it’s not hymnal material.
Of course, the 19th-century also produced some very popular tunes that were just for fun: Jingle Bells, for instance – which is also not in our hymnal.
The thing is, Christmas, as I was saying, has these two very different moods: on the one hand, the merry and festive -- and on the other hand, the peaceful, the quiet bliss. If you were going to pull off a holiday that pulls together such opposite moods, how would you do it? With music. You sing Jingle Bells, and you sing Silent Night – you sing about laughing all the way, and you sing about “all is calm” – and you keep going back and forth until the two moods start to seem like one thing after all. And maybe they are.
Sing to us about the Carols of Christmas.
"Carols of Christmas (Love is All Around)"
Clark William Lawlor
Christmas is coming, the air is dark and cold.The next piece, in a few minutes, will be "Now the Holly Bears a Berry," which is a variation on "The Holly and the Ivy." This evocation of the natural world in connection has me reflecting on the ways that Christmas may be taken to be about something beyond nature. And yet, this particular carol embeds the Christmas story completely within nature.
We gather together, the young and the old,
Singing carols of Christmas, ‘round a warm fire's glow,
Sharing stories and laughing, as we shelter from the snow,
CHORUS: Singing, "Joy to the world", "The First Noel",
As we sing on this "Silent Night," knowing all is well.
"Do you hear what I hear?" Listen to the sound,
For even "In the Bleak Midwinter," love is all around.
The frost on the windows, the snowflakes drifting down,
We all build a snowman, there's magic all around.
The kids open presents: pajamas or a train,
Then we circle 'round the piano, and start a new refrain,
CHORUS
Oh, come, let us “Deck the Halls,” “The Herold Angels Sing,”
Oh, “What Sweeter Music, can we bring?”
This Christmas time (this Christmas time),
This Christmas time (this Christmas time),
Oh, “Have Yourself a Merry little Christmas.”
CHORUS
As we noted earlier, our Unitarian Universalist tradition teaches that love is made flesh and dwells among us every day, in every act of caring. By longstanding tradition, we set aside December 25 to particularly celebrate this fact. And yet the holiday is called Christmas. It’s a Christian holiday – and isn’t the Christian story about love being made flesh and dwelling among us is a bit more... specific?
Sometimes we use the word “supernatural” to describe the difference between the traditional Christian account of Christian and a more “naturalized” version. Some people believe in supernatural stuff going on, and some people don’t, and there’s the difference. Some people tell a supernatural story about Christmas – and some people don’t go in for that. The thing is, the distinction between natural and supernatural isn’t as clear as we sometimes imagine it is.
That distinction is a cultural product, and it has shifted over time. The very idea of supernatural – that is, the sort of line we draw between what we call “natural” and what we call “supernatural” -- is all fairly recent. And it’s not always clear where or how the line is to be drawn.
For instance, it has occurred to me – and might have occurred to you -- that the ghosts depicted in the movie "Ghostbusters" are not supernatural. You might think that if anything counted as an example of a supernatural entity it would be ghosts – and that people who don’t believe in the supernatural, therefore do not believe in ghosts. But if “ghost” means the sort of entity fictionally depicted in Ghostbusters, then ghosts are entirely natural.
Why do I say this? The ghostbusters use nuclear-powered backpacks to shoot a stream of protons at the ghost, and then they contain it within a metal box. If something is susceptible to physical protons and a physical box, then that something is a physical thing. The entities are fictional – and the physics involved is fictional, too -- but it’s still recognizable as physics.
There is a history of uncertainty about where to draw the line between natural and supernatural. There was a boom in seances in the 1920s and into the 1930s. This was the time when radios were first coming out. If invisible disembodied voices could speak to us from afar through the medium of a box, then why couldn’t the spirits of the dead speak to us through a medium? If radios were natural, then maybe seances were, too. Or if seances depended on something supernatural, then it sure seemed as if radios did too.
A lot of people were unsure about where to draw that line between natural and supernatural. Today, our physicists propose that there might be something called dark matter. The way that galaxies curve in their rotation, the way galaxy clusters form, and the tiny fluctuations in the cosmic background radiation seem to require a lot more mass out there than we can see or detect – so physicists hypothesize that the mass is there, but it’s a different kind of mass that’s invisible, undetectable – dark matter – which they estimate, has a total mass of more than 5 times the mass of all the visible matter in the universe. Is dark matter supernatural? If you say “no,” then why not?
Physicists are divided on the question of whether quantum indeterminacy is irreducible – but if it is, that would mean there’s no natural law that determines certain quantum phenomena. Would that make them supernatural?
They more you look at this notion of supernatural, the more elusive it becomes. It’s not at all clear what, if anything, it could mean.
There are, in fact, a number of approaches to Christmas that quite explicitly ground the basic story in nature. "The Holly and the Ivy" is quite an old Carol – one of the few that might go back to before the 19th century, though the earliest known publication was in 1833. "The Holly and the Ivy" - and Doughlas Wagner’s riff on that carol -- “Now the Holly Bears a Berry” -- seem to emphasize the continuity between the natural and the human. The holly brings forth berries – and Mary brings forth her babe. There is wonder there – a kind of awe inspiring magic – in the way that life brings forth life, but there’s nothing we could call supernatural, unless we called everything supernatural.
It’s all natural, through and through. And that’s just super!
"Now the Holly Bears a Berry"
Traditional English Carol; arr. Douglas E. Wagner
Now the holly bears a berry, as red as the roseOur Choir began this morning with “Sing a Song of Merry Christmas” which urged us to put care away this holiday. And may you indeed make time for merriment this holiday season. But I’ve been saying there are two ways to put care away: one is with boisterous merriment, and the other is with a calm and blissful peace. With the choir’s closing number for this special music service, we circle round to the peace theme. Peace, peace, peace on earth, good will to all. Joy, love, singing together. The choir will invite us, at a certain point, to join in a chorus of "Silent Night."
And Mary wrapped her baby in warm swaddling clothes.
And Mary bore her baby, for all to come and see,
And the first tree in the green wood, it was the holly.
Now the holly bears a berry as white as the snow,
And Mary held her baby in her arms long ago.
And Mary shared her baby with all who came to see,
And the first tree in the green wood, it was the holly.
Now the holly bears a berry as black as the night,
And Mary laid her baby in tghe moon's crystal light.
And Mary shared her baby with all who came to see,
And the first tree in the green wood, it was the holly.
"Peace, Peace"
Words and Music Rick and Sylvia Powell; arr. Fred Bock
Peace, peace, peace on earth - and good will to all.
This is a time for joy. This is a time for love.
Now let us all sing together of Peace, peace, peace on earth.
Peace, peace, peace on earth -- and good will to all.
This is a time for joy. This is a time for love.
Silent night! Holy night!
All is calm, all is bright.
Round yon virgin, mother and child
Holy infant so tender and mild;
Sleep in heavenly peace, sleep in heavenly peace.
Now let us all sing together of
Peace, peace, peace on earth.
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