You know how at the beginning of A Christmas Carol Ebenezer Scrooge hated everything to do with Christmas, but by the end of the movie, he was its biggest fan? That’s my life story, minus the Bah Humbug and the hauntings. Sadly, I wasted many good years between childhood and midlife focusing too much on how much the holidays cost and not enough on what they were worth.
A huge part of my yuletide u-turn was music. The first time I remember Christmas stirring my heart came one December night in Florida while I was washing dishes. David Phelps version of O Holy Night came up in a YouTube playlist on the TV and by the time by the he hit the high note in the line “….fall on your knees, O hear the angel voices, O night divine, O night when Christ was born” the tears were streaming down my cheeks. In the days before my mother and mother in law had flown down to spend the Thanksgiving weekend with us. We made a trip to see the Christmas decorations in Seaside and they helped Honey turn our new home into a winter wonderland. Our home looked like Christmas, our mothers had gone back to Tennessee and I was missing family and all the little markers leading up to Christmas back home. David Phelps note wasn’t high enough to shatter glass, but it was enough to shatter the hardness in my heart and all the emotions poured out. In that moment my holiday joy was born again and I was filled the Christmas Spirit.
In the years since that night, I have embraced the entire holiday season fully, perhaps even gluttonously. A huge part of that has been holiday music, which I’ve carefully collected and selected into a number of playlists that run incessantly through late November and into early January.
This year, listening to those songs is not going to be enough for me, I’m going to need to talk about them too, hence this writing. My goal for December is to do a little write up each day for the various songs that fill my playlists like treasured ornaments on a tree. I’m beginning this endeavor with a song that I encountered last year that has made its way to the top of my favorites list this year.
The song is called “I Believe in Father Christmas”, written by Greg Lake and Peter Sinfield the year I was born, 1975. It would have hit #1 in the UK, were it not for Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody. The song is not a “traditional” Christmas song, and by that I mean a modern, Western, commercialized caricature of the holiday, though it is faithful to the more traditional, ie, ancient, view of the holiday. Lake said it was a protest of the commercialization of Christmas and Sinfield said it was about the loss of innocence and childhood belief. My favorite version is by U2 from 2008, and released on an EP of the same name in 2021. U2 is not officially a Christian band, but they are, as a great many of their songs are drawn directly from the Scriptures. Seriously, look up a live version of U2 doing “40”, which is their take on Psalm 40, and tell me they aren’t a Christian band.
The lyrics to I Believe in Father Christmas are as follows:
They said there'll be snow at Christmas
They said there'll be peace on earth
But instead it just kept on raining
A veil of tears for the virgin birth
I remember one Christmas morning
A winter's light and a distant choir
And the peal of a bell and that Christmas tree smell
And their eyes full of tinsel and fire
They sold me a dream of Christmas
They sold me a silent night
And they told me a fairy story
'Til I believed in the Israelite
And I believed in father Christmas
I looked to the sky with excited eyes
That I woke with a yawn in the first light of dawn
And I saw him and through his disguise
I wish you a hopeful Christmas
I wish you a brave new year
All anguish, pain and sadness
Leave your heart and let your road be clear
They said there'd be snow at Christmas
They said there'll be peace on earth
Hallelujah, Noel be it heaven or hell
The Christmas we get we deserve
I’m not going to interpret the song, though it has profound meanings for me, but I encourage you to give it a listen and just “sit” with it, meditate on it, contemplate the message being communicated.
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