Let’s Rethink Our Holly-Jolly Christmas Songs
— Tuesday, December 18th, 2012 —
Sometimes I learn a lot from conversations I was never intended to hear. This happened the other day as I was stopping by my local community bookstore. It’s a small store, and a quiet store so it was impossible not to eavesdrop as I heard a young man tell his friend how much he hated Christmas. And, you know what, the more he talked, the more I understood his point.
This man wasn’t talking about the hustle and bustle of the holidays, or about the stresses of family meals or all the things people tend to complain about. What he hated was the music.
This guy started by lampooning Sting’s Christmas album, and I found myself smiling as I browsed because he is so right; it’s awful. But then he went on to say that he hated Christmas music across the board. That’s when I started to feel as though I might be in the presence of the Grinch. You know, when every Who down in Who-ville, the tall and the small, would stand close together, with Christmas bells ringing; they’d stand hand-in-hand. And the Who’s would start singing. The sour old green villain didn’t like that.
But then this man explained why he found the music so bad. It wasn’t just that it was cloying. It’s that it was boring.
“Christmas is boring because there’s no narrative tension,” he said. “It’s like reading a book with no conflict.”
Now he had my attention.
I’m sure this man had thought this for a long time, but maybe he felt freer to say it because we were only hours out from hearing the horrifying news of a massacre of innocent children in Connecticut. For him, the tranquil lyrics of our Christmas songs couldn’t encompass such terror. Maybe we should think about that.
Of course, some of the blame is on our sentimentalized Christmas of the American civil religion. Simeon the prophet never wished anyone a “holly-jolly Christmas” or envisioned anything about chestnuts roasting on an open fire. But there’s our songs too, the songs of the church. We ought to make sure that what we sing measures up with the, as this fellow would put it, “narrative tension” of the Christmas story.
The first Christmas carol, after all, was a war hymn. Mary of Nazareth sings of God’s defeat of his enemies, about how in Christ he had demonstrated his power and “has brought down the mighty from their thrones and exalted those of humble estate” (Lk. 1:52). There are some villains in mind there.
Simeon’s song, likewise, speaks of the “fall and rising of many in Israel” and of a sword that would pierce the heart of Mary herself. Even the “light of the Gentiles” he speaks about is in the context of warfare. After all, the light, the Bible tells us, overcomes the darkness (Jn. 1:5), and frees us from the grip of the devil (2 Cor. 4).
In a time of obvious tragedy, the unbearable lightness of Christmas seems absurd to the watching world. But, even in the best of times, we all know that we live in a groaning universe, a world of divorce courts and cancer cells and concentration camps. Just as we sing with joy about the coming of the Promised One, we ought also to sing with groaning that he is not back yet (Rom. 8:23), sometimes with groanings too deep for lyrics.
The man in the bookstore knew that reality is complicated. There’s grit, and there’s tension. Without it, Christmas didn’t seem real to life. It’s hard to get more tense than being born under a king’s death sentence (Matt. 2:16), and with an ancient dragon crouching at the birth canal to devour you (Rev. 12:4). But this man didn’t hear any of that in Christmas. I’m glad I overheard him.
We have a rich and complicated and often appropriately dark Christmas hymnody. We can sing of blessings flowing “far as the curse is found,” of the one who came to “free us all from Satan’s power.”
Let’s sing that, every now and then, where we can be overheard.
27 Responses to “Let’s Rethink Our Holly-Jolly Christmas Songs”
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Dr. Moore,
Thanks.
“Let light upon the darkness break, that sinners from their death may wake.” ~ Basil Manley, Jr.
Tobby E. Smith
Thanks for this post Dr. Moore. Hope you guys have a blessed Christmas.
Thanks for this post. And thanks for reminding us that the first “Christologian” was his mother.
Dr. Moore,
Thanks for this post. It reminds me of one of my favorite Christmas songs, “I Heard The Bells On Christmas Day”. Hearing that song and reading the story behind it has given me a better perspective on Christmas.
A refreshing alternative I’ve enjoyed this year is Daniel Renstrom’s “On the Incarnation.” One song (Rise and Fall) is based on Simeon’s song. It reminds us of the stark reality of what Jesus’ birth means to the world: For some, His birth is great news of great joy; for others, however, it is a stone on which they ultimately stumble. Great post; thanks!
Along the same lines, I appreciate this quote by N.T. Wright from his book, “For All God’s Worth: True Worship and the Calling of the Church”:
“For many, Christianity is just a beautiful dream. It’s a world in which everyday reality goes a bit blurred. It’s nostalgic, cosy, and comforting. But real Christianity isn’t like that at all. Take Christmas, for instance: a season of nostalgia, of carols and candles and firelight and happy children. But that misses the point completely. Christmas is not a reminder that the world is really quite a nice old place. It reminds us that the world is a shockingly bad old place, where wickedness flourishes unchecked, where children are murdered, where civilized countries make a lot of money by selling weapons to uncivilized ones so they can blow each other apart. Christmas is God lighting a candle; and you don’t light a candle in a room that’s already full of sunlight. You light a candle in a room that’s so murky that the candle, when lit, reveals just how bad things really are. The light shines in the darkness, says St. John, and the darkness has not overcome it.
Christmas, then, is not a dream, a moment of escapism. Christmas is the reality, which shows up the rest of ‘reality’. And for Christmas, here, read Christianity. Either Jesus is the Lord of the world, and all reality makes sense in his light, or he is dangerously irrelevant to the problems and possibilities of today’s world. There is no middle ground. Either Jesus was, and is, the Word of God, or he, and the stories Christians tell about him, are lies.”
Dr. Moore,
I agree with most of what this man, so troubled by Christmas music, said. What’s more, I’d include the a hefty part of the canon of contemporary Christian music as well. The is little acknowledgment of paradoxical tension in most Christian music. Thankfuly, there are rich exceptions, too numerous to mention. Sadly the dearth of Christian music so popular on Christian radio puts me to sleep. No wonder the world is confused.
I have to concur with much of what Mr. Moore says here, but (admittedly) I have a soft-spot for some of the Christmas songs insofar as many of them were post-World War II creations, often driven by the “exhale context” of the period. I think some of the writers of that period knew that they could speak more of a romanticized vision, because everyone already knew far too much about the horror of reality. Context is often important to discuss when even approaching music, and I suspect that everyone from Burl Ives to Bing Crosby were not thinking of promoting hard-core escapism, so much as rejoicing in their new found respite.
@David MacKenzie,
Agreed. My wife and I were talking about this very thing the other day - how many Christmas “classics” have come out of the decades of the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s? We could only think of a few (maybe 1-2 per decade), and by far most were written in the 40’s and 50’s.
Hope you and your family are well! We were down your way yesterday, but hopefully we’ll see you next time we’re in the area.
“Just as we sing with joy about the coming of the Promised One, we ought also to sing with groaning that he is not back yet (Rom. 8:23), sometimes with groanings too deep for lyrics.”
This rings true with my thoughts of late Dr. Moore. Thanks for your words.
The Gospels certainly do reveal that Jesus was born into a dark world and there is in fact “narrative tension” surrounding Christ’s birth which is often ignored. It seems to me, however, that the church has largely overlooked the main event (Christ’s death and resurrection) while dedicating an entire season to focus on some of the background to this event. There’s a reason the early church didn’t celebrate Christmas but meet constantly to celebrate Christ’s redemptive work. Moses’ birth was quite a miraculous event too, but how many of the Jewish people celebrate his birth for weeks while paying little attention to Passover and the celebration of the exodus?
Well said. I’m preaching on Simeon’s prophesy on Sunday. The conversation you overheard (and your blog) reinforces to me that the message needs to be heard. Thanks, and I’m glad I’m not the only one who eavesdrops at the bookstore . . . .
This was an interesting article, and it made me think. I’m also one who dislikes many Christmas songs. I think they’re often shallow and empty of meaning, which parallels closely to the point of the article. I think I would give a slightly different reason for the shallowness, though. I don’t think an absence of the “narrative tension” described here is exactly the problem, because I’m not sure such tension is always necessary to make a song deep and meaningful. I think there’s a place for songs that focus on the brightness, and perhaps even for ones that make no mention of the conflict or darkness. I think there can be value in simply celebrating what is good and beautiful. It’s harder and rarer to do this without contrasting against the negative, but I don’t know that I’d call it impossible.
Instead, I think the real problem is that many Christmas lyrics (and many non-Christmas lyrics) simply lack depth of thought. When lyrics (or any other creative expression) are nothing more than the effervescent bubbling over of platitudes, they’re going to be bad - whether they’re iridescent bubbles of optimism, or tar-pitch bubbles of negativity (and believe me, I’ve encountered both). I would say thoughtless, effervescent bubbling in songwriting probably causes the lack of narrative tension described here. I would even say that depth of thought will often - perhaps usually - lead to consideration of the conflict and “narrative tension” in life. But I’m not so sure this is always the case, and anyway I would say that the lack of thought, not the lack of conflict, stands at the center of the problem.
I have been working on the “narrative tension” of this Nativity poem I wrote in 2010 for weeks now. Happy-clappy Christians hate its dystopian vision of the birth. I have stripped it of every ounce of cheese, and put even more rumors of violence in it. It suits the mood of this grieving season even more.
I would welcome it being set to music. I hear it as a kind of singer-songwritery lament, but with a chorus of “This shall be a sign for you” repeated the way “How He Loves Us” does. Something a mother could rock her child to sleep with, that is comforting. I call it “A Sign for You”.
It is not angelic Excelsis Deos, but
a mother’s anguished cry he first hears–
then the baby king breathes in
the scent of dung,
opens eyes to smears of blood
feels the earth rumble
with soldier’s horse’s hooves –
and tastes the tears of Rachel’s lament.
The smelly vagrants who visit,
who are first to wonder at Heaven’s exile:
an infant bound in cloths
laid in an animal’s trough,
nestled in a hollow
made in a cold stone, resting
like a corpse in a sarcophagus –
know that suffering marks his true advent.
But we outfit the parents with halos,
snuggle a fat baby in a cosy blanket,
and sprinkle the scene with pretty angels
spangled in gold. We must tell our story
voiced with British accents
for suburban flat screens, drenched in sentiment.
We strip the angelic message of its mourning
–but it was for orphans and lepers
and hookers –for the night shift workers
He was anointed.
He came for haters of Christmas,
and of Him. Even Creation groaned
at His birth–and a dragon waited to devour Him.
The bright star leads to a tomb.
The sign for you yet still
is cloth strips and hollowed-out stone.
Holly Jolly Christmas sung by Burle Ives was the number one Chistmas song played on the radio when I was a kid growing up in the 60-70’s. Still love to hear it till this day.
Robert Sakovich, I just heard the history behind that song/poem (this past Sunday). Longfellow wrote it upon hearing that his son had been gravely injured in battle, and not long after he lost his wife in a fire. Darkness will always make the truth stand out more brightly.
Some of the better Christmas hymns reaffirm a promise, but a denial of history, thus often have a melancholic tone, as well. “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” cries out to “close the path to misery.”
I was always struck by Albert Camus’ observation that the birth of the savior is marked by the slaughter of the innocents, more painfully real this year, albeit different causes.
That’s where, for me, advent and epiphany help situate Christmas in a linear fashion, waiting and hoping because we have a future, rather than sentimental nostalgic for a one-off event.; a kind of Groundhog Day - here we go again - we never get out of.
In a sense, I can’t wait to no longer celebrate Christmas, when the waiting will be over.