Can We Talk 2

Christmas Carols

         As with many things that are familiar to us, we don't always know or remember the stories behind Christmas carols. Most of us probably are familiar with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's I Heard the Bells On Christmas Day. We hear it every December on the radio and at church.

         It may get foggy in your memory like it does mine. It was written after the Civil War when the country was still in turmoil. Death, sorrow, destruction, and loss were all around as yet another Christmas season came upon them. This was before modern media and advertising, before Black Friday or Cyber Monday. His son Charles Longfellow lay in a hospital recovering from war injuries, so the devastation was very personal to him. The poem, the carol, was about his own inner reaction to the horror in the world around him, and the revelation he found in the ringing of the church bells at Christmas.

         I always thought It Came Upon A Midnight Clear was some modern misguided carol. No one knows the hour of Jesus birth, or the weather conditions for that matter. It's not a modern song at all. I only recently learned it was written in 1849. The midnight is not about the birth of the Christ child, but the beginning of the truce, the end of the Mexican-American war. This poet was also troubled by the world condition, the lack of peace on earth. A season of peace weighed heavily on his heart. He began to compare the "peace", the end of his tragic war, to the birth of the Prince of Peace. While the end of one war did not signal the end of all wars but pointed to the promise of peace for all the earth.

         We find ourselves in the same difficult situation. When there is so much hatred and violence all around the globe, Christmas is a reminder of lost our world is. Hope, joy, love, and peace are not readily found. You certainly don't see them on any of the news channels. So we have to find them for ourselves, on an individual basis. Christmas is a challenge to us to have hope in an unfriendly world, to be models of peace in our own lives, and to share love with a world where love is not easily understood. t is a challenge to us to find joy in the small things, the everyday things and to share it with others.