Christmas Songs

I hope your Wednesday is going well. Something I love listening to at Christmas time is Christmas songs. The songs literally transport us to Christmas and give us the Christmas spirit. I wrote an essay on Christmas songs in 2019. Would like to share the essay with you today. Christmas songs I love Christmas songs. Over the years I have liked some more than others. There are Christmas songs that retell the story of Christmas, there are happy Christmas songs, and there are sad Christmas songs. There are songs that capture different aspects of Christmas and there are songs that combine parts of different Christmas songs and stringing them all together. There are Christmas songs that are new and there are old Christmas songs. During Christmas time I love to listen to Christmas songs and immerse myself in the meaning of the words in the songs. There are secular Christmas songs and Christmas songs filled with religious fervor. There are Christmas songs that veer away from Christmas and retell the entire life of Christ and there are Christmas songs from different points of views such as Joseph’s lullaby by mercy me and songs that capture mary’s angst like breath of heaven by amy grant. The most classic sad Christmas song is o come o come emmmanuel. O come o come Emmanuel sees Christmas as the fulfillment of a promise spoken of in the old testament. While living on our house located on eastmoor drive I think I heard O come o come Emmanuel by aaron shust. In the beginning of the song there is lots of eastern and middle eastern sounding rhythms which made me pay attention to the song. The song has dark words like ransom and captive, mourns, exile, it talks about gloomy clouds of night and deaths dark shadows. There is yearning and longing in this song and sees baby Jesus as a promise who will rescue humankind. Although this song has such sad words the message of the song is an invitation to rejoice because there was hope and Jesus is the hope. The refrain of the song after every stanza is to rejoice, and rejoice. The repetition of the refrain rejoice makes it a bittersweet song which is how life sometimes feels and how Christmas is for many of us . Maybe this Aaron Shust, pretty much every contemporary Christian artist has sung this song stamping the song with their individual style. From Aaron Shust, Jeremy Camp, Matt maher, Hannah kerr, Bethany Dillon, and a host of others. I like it sometimes when artists modernizes and adapts a traditional song to make it their own. Thus matt maher’s rendition includes the lines take heart o weary soul soul take heart for help is on its way which is different from the traditional rendition by aaronshust. And Hannah kerr’s rendition is the exact replica of matt maher’s rendition which includes the lines o weary soul take heart for help is on its way. Jeremy camps rendition sticks to the original lyrics without including extra verses and enunciates each word in the song slowly and clearly and singing the rejoice part of the song exultantly and jubilantly and at the end after the song is over when Emmanuel is sung in a crescendo like fashion the song ends and the instrumentals start again in the tune of the song for a while before ending. Mercy Me’s rendition of the song does not sound sad and they include no new lines to the song but a humming that goes ooooa few times in the song. The tune is different from traditional renditions. Francesca battistelli’s rendition is very slow and the background scoere to rejoice is very sad sounding in keeping with the mood of the song. So is lauren daigle’s. when I listened to the rendition of this song by lauren daigle I heard the line that says God will fill this whole world with heaven’s peace. Once while driving around doing errands I heard a song on the radio which sounded like a lesson in geography. The song had names of places in the US scattered in it. It described a man travelling from Tennessee to Pennsylvania during the holidays and described the journey others took from Pennsylvania to the sunny shores of dixie which is the southern united states. It described folks travelling from the atlantic shore to the pacific all just to go home and eat home made pumpkin pie. I imagined people who took jobs far away from the places they were raised who were travelling in cars across the highways crisscrossing the US just to have a slice of home made pumpkin pie where their old parents and siblings and their families would be waiting for them and there would be hugs and lots of visheshams to share. AT work my co worker told me that she did not expect any customers on the day before Christmas because everyone would be travelling. Travelling to go home then is an integral part of Christmas. Scattered parts come home at Christmas. The other song about home that I felt intrigued by is I’ll be home this Christmas by Meghan trainor. I first heard it in the store I worked. I found the tune soulful and could decipher on parts of the lyrics. Whatever I heard I liked. At home, I read the full lyrics and liked the song even more. The lyrics were more than just lyrics. There was poetry. Although I could not fully understand the song I liked the song partly because the song was ununderstandable. The song is about santa claus calling a girl and giving her different messages. Santa tells her to be prepared because winter love was spreading everywhere. Santa tells her that she should pack all her gifts with love and care and santa tells her to call those who are waiting for her that she would be late. The song had lines like winter love is spreading everywhere, summer came and took off with the spring, and that on the way back home the girl would light up every tree and hang stockings for herself and her love on the tree. We usually hang stockings on the mantle or door knobs but on trees? The song says that the wind blew up the snow into the sky. isn’t that how the winter landscape looks like sometimes in Iowa when snow piles up every where and if there is a wind a snowy mist rises up. Another Christmas song that I like is when love came down by point of grace. I usually listen to this song a lot of times during the Christmas season. What if you stay awake on Christmas eve and at 2 am look out the window. Would you see a snowy street? Would you see the homes clothed in white? The song conjures images of Christmas in midwestern America. Snowy streets, and songs sung by candle light. This song is sung by four ladies and their voices have a shimmering quality to it that makes it just right for this song. I love the rendition of It’s the most wonderful time of the year is by barlow girl. It is full of lines that admonish and remind us to be of good cheer, simply because it is the most wonderful time of the year. Mistletoeing and glwing hearts, sharing Christmas stories from the past, happiest season of all because of holiday greetings and gay happy meetings, and parties and toasting marshmallows, ad wonderful stories of christmasses past. Caroling out in the snow How many kings by downhere is another favorite but this is one song that tells the story of christ’s birth but also includes easter in the lyrics. Follow the star to a place unexpected, because everything about Christ is unexpected. This song says that myrhh the gift given to baby Jesus by one of the wise men is a foreshadowing of the cross Christ would suffer later in life. This song talks about Christ’s mission to pour out His heart for the salvation of humankind. The song describes Christ as a newborn savior, not for a moment forgetting that the humble, meek, helpless baby wrapped in his mother’s shawl is truly our savior who loved us in a sacrificial way. Another song that pulls at my heartstrings is Joseph’s lullaby by Mercy Me. If you think of the Christmas story the saddest character has to be Joseph. Mary was visited by the angel and would carry God’s son and would be called blessed by all generations but what about poor Joseph. The angel only visited him in a dream and told him to marry mary who he wanted to abandon. So when baby Jesus was born what might have been Joseph’s emotions? Would he have been able to bond with the baby who was not his own. Joseph’s lullaby tells us that Joseph loved baby Jesus and was fully cognizant of baby Jesus’ purpose but his heart was torn. He wanted baby Jesus to fulfill his purpose but he also wanted just to be a dad to baby Jesus.