I had an early rush of Christmas joy this week. “I have a favour to ask,” a friend wrote. Did I know of any Christmas carol, or any hymn that catches the realities of the Incarnation? He wrote, “I’m looking for something that talks about things like the scandal of Mary getting pregnant, the filth of a stable, the mass murder of male babies in Bethlehem.”
Don’t get me wrong. When chestnuts are roasting on an open fire, I’m there. When Ebeneezer Scrooge finally opens his heart and his pocketbook, when Jimmie Stewart kisses the wobbly knob on the banister, or when the Junior Choir sings “Away in a Manger” I’m there, Kleenex in hand. I love the mushy side of Christmas.
But the biblical stories are themselves full of drama, surprise, humour, adventure, yes, and sentiment–everything we hunger for in a good story. Dickens and the other Victorians knew how to tell a good Christmas story and write a good carol.
Who are telling these stories for our time? Here are some of my favourites.
Since the early eighties, the Iona Community has written carols that counter familiar or sentimentalized versions of the story. The collection Innkeepers and Light Sleepers has songs such as “The Refugees,” which places the story of the flight into Egypt into the context of modern refugees. In the same collection, the “Carol of the Epiphany” provides as an alternative to “We Three Kings” lines that sing of the fact that he was not “remote from crime or cheap disgrace” and that he lived–even as a supposedly gentle child–in jeopardy.
If you are looking for tart and tender, both abound in “Carol of the Nativity,” in the Iona collection “Heaven Shall Not Wait.” This carol begins:
A pregnant girl none will ignore:
Her husband knocks a guest-house door.
Who is the girl? Why knock the door?
Thus starts a tale of which there’s more.
But if you’re looking for a hard-hitting riposte to stained-glass prettiness, look no further than “Once in Judah’s least-known city.” You guessed it: it’s to be sung to the tune of “Once in Royal David’s city” and it can be found in their Wild Goose Songs, Vol. 1. It contains the lines “Mary’s mum and dad went wild/When they heard their daughter had a child.” One of these days, I’m going to use it along with the original–both presented with joy and respect–and let each work its own effect in its own way.
New Zealand’s Shirley Erena Murray has won a world-wide following with her hymns and songs. Her song, “Carol our Christmas,” presents a “down-under” view of the Nativity and invites us to sing of “an upside-down Christmas,” where “snow is not falling and trees are not bare.” Her carol sings of “musterers” rather than shepherds, and the lure of summer and the beach, rather than “snow falling, snow on snow.”
Murray is subtly subversive. Even her title, “Carol our Christmas,” which seems obvious and floats effortlessly off the tongue, turns noun into verb, reverses the usual order of the words “Christmas” and “carol,” and invites us in northern climes to recognize that “our” version of the story is not the only one, that folks very different from us have also claimed it as their own.
An even harder-hitting carol of Murray’s is “Hunger Carol.” In it, we are reminded that “Christmas must be shared/every child needs bread.” It confesses that it’s by our greed that we crucify the “Son of poverty” on a Christmas tree.
These might be new(ish) carols, but the themes they present are not new; they are not trendy or short-lived. These ideas can be seen, and sung, in collections as old as The Oxford Book of Carols, which itself contains carols going back to the Middle Ages. But they can speak to our time in fresh ways, and they can bring needed balance whenever we fear that nostalgia and greeting-card sentiments rule our Yule.
Innkeepers and Light Sleepers, Wild Goose Songs, Vol. 1, and other song collections from the Iona Community are widely available through GIA, Chicago.
Hunger Carol (Child of Joy and Peace), can be found in “Sound the Bamboo,” the hymnal of the Christian Conference of Asia or through Hope Publishing.
