Tag: christmas

The Weary World Rejoices

            This week before Christmas, lyrics of carols repeat in our heads when we are walking into churches, department stores, or the lobby of my athletic club.  Rightfully called ear worms some pursue us like demons to expel our sins of the year. Penance: Ten repetitions of The Little Drummer Boy.  There may be no other holiday abounding in so much song as Christmas.  Think of it.  How many Valentine’s Day songs do you sing throughout February?  I love the carols I learned as a child and play every December, either on recordings or my hesitant playing on my piano.  Seventy to eighty years are adequate to retain the lyrics even if sung only one month of the year.  The melodies are harmonious and, with a few exceptions, notes within a close pitch so I can sing along with minimal straining.

            Singing along is best because almost everyone else knows the carols as well.  Each year Pacific Lutheran University’s renown Choir of the West performs a Christmas Concert at Benaroya Hall, home of the Seattle Symphony.  Two hundred college choir members walk down parallel aisles holding lit candles before ascending the steps to the stage.  There they move into risers as gracefully as swimming swans.  And all around their voices, accompanied by the orchestra, fill the hall with celebratory sound.  After every three or four pieces sung by the choir, the conductor turns to the audience, waving us to join in on a familiar carol.  We all rise as one, and we sing and SING and SING.  The song might be Joy to the World, and it might not, but JOY overwhelms me as I sing familiar songs with as much choral gusto as I can summon.  Surrounded by several hundred voices, who will recognize my strained, untutored voice?  I feel marvelous.  I feel proud when I can get through two verses without having to read the printed lyrics.  This is MY music, My heritage.  By the second verses, I am back in the children’s choir of a small white Congregational Church in Massachusetts.

            After all those vocal trips to the manger, this year I am focusing more on the lyrics.  Many were originally poems, later adapted to music.  Because I am often captured by a phrase and held until I thoroughly hold it to the light of thought, my earworm this Christmas is not melody but verse.  Over and over, I recite The Weary World Rejoices.   In 1843, I learned, Placide Cappeau, wrote the poem O Holy Night in a commission to write something to celebrate the opening of new church in Fance.  Later, the French composer of operas, Adolphe Adam in 1847, set the poem to music.  

O holy night, the stars are brightly shining,
It is the night of the dear Savior’s birth;
Long lay the world in sin and error pining,
‘Till he appeared and the soul felt its worth.
A thrill of hope the weary world rejoices,
For yonder breaks a new and glorious morn;

Now I know the dates of the original, I wonder what was happening in France in the 1840’s to include the phrase, “the weary world,” as if anyone reading the poem would agree that the world is exhausted.  I intuit that the 1840’s in France were similarly stressed as we are in America today.  Still the richest country in the world, if the news is to be believed, Americans are struggling with their finances and their values.  I don’t need the news to tell me that there is such political division in our country that we are exhausted hearing the latest shocking event coming out of the nation’s capitol.  I have friends who, in an effort to shield their mental health, no longer listen to the news on television.  I walk cautiously around lifelong friends who have political beliefs I know are contrary to my own.  Will I engage them in debate?  No way.  I am just too exhausted.

Yet there is O Holy Night that acknowledges the world’s weariness as a backdrop for rejoicing.  There in the birth of a messiah is a thrill of hope.  Here the day before Christmas, I am rereading the many holiday cards sending greetings our way.  The most common phrase is Merry Christmas, but this year, I am finding another word often repeating.  It is hope.  Such an abstract word.  Out there like a thin line of ground fog on a winter morning is hope.   We can’t earn it or buy it.  Emily Dickinsen wrote Hope is the thing with feathers/That perches in the soul,/And sings the tune without the words,/And never stops at all. There it is, I notice hope  and rejoicing more when the world is weary. 

Perhaps this season, when so much seems uncertain, when many Americans feel their voices are not heard. we are more aware than in certain times of the promise of a Messiah.  So much better than putting our money in a lottery.  Like Emily’s bird flying against a storm, we are singing, if only the tune without the words.  I find comfort in the community of carolers.  I hope you will sing along.

WHAT DO I NEED FOR CHRISTMAS?

Metropolitan Museum of Art NYC

Growing up listening to Sunday sermons, not a year passed without the sermon whose message was, “It is more blessed to give than receive.”  I got it.  Be generous.  There are so many people less fortunate than you. God will smile upon your giving with grace.

Then one Sunday, Dr Dale Turner’s sermon was “It is As Blessed to Receive as to Give.”  His sermon opened a window to the welcome light of being a gracious receiver.  He reframed that common phrase: “Oh really you shouldn’t have!” when someone brings us a gift. To say someone should not have given a gift diminishes the one making the gift.  Why?  Because in making a gift, the giver has invested thought, perhaps even love.  Expressing joy, gratitude, or surprise in receiving that gift, you are returning a spiritual gift-in-kind. “Your gift matters, and you also matter.”

I am going back here many decades, when living in an apartment house with a central courtyard. One Mother’s Day the young moms were sharing social time in that courtyard when five-year-old Kimmie handed her mother a small African violet.  “Oh darn,” her mom said, “one more plant I need to water.”  I still vividly see Kimmie’s injured look.  Likely with no bad intentions, her mom was being witty for the other moms present but disrespecting her child’s gift.

Christmas morning, we gather around the living room, tree lit, fireplace aglow while our three grandchildren distribute gifts they have purchased or made for us.  When Max brings me his present wrapped creatively in newsprint or finger-painted paper, he seems to hold his breath while I remove abundant cellophane tape and open the package.  After my joyful hug of appreciation, he exhales as if he were swimming underwater until he could experience my reaction.

Each fall, when relatives ask what we would like for Christmas, we say, “We don’t need a thing,” and that is true.  I imagine one more kitchen device I have no room to store, and I beg off with “Let’s just send consumables this year.”  I make raspberry jam to send and await my sister-in-law’s Ukrainian cookies.  One step from there is “Let’s just do cards this year.”  Both sides agree.  Then a week before Christmas, a beautifully wrapped box arrives from my brother and sister-in-law with a card that reads. “a gift for the cook.”

I feel bad, because I had sent only jars of homemade strawberry jam.  What happened to our agreement for only consumables? To relieve my feelings of remorse, I head for the computer, go online and order something in return, hoping it will arrive before Christmas. I look for something I think my sister-in-law will enjoy and may not already own.  I am happy when I think I found a good gift. It doesn’t take a degree in psychology to conclude that my actions may be less about a gift for my sister-in-law than a way to relieve the guilt I feel for sending only jam.  Surely it was her opportunity to give that matters– a pleasure for her that I might receive with gratitude.

After all, what is a gift but a way to connect?  Each year, my husband makes a beautiful art card, a watercolor scene.  I pair it with a poem.  We have lived so long that our card list is quite long.  I joke that the only way one can get off our mailing list is to die.  Now at eighty-years-old, I feel the ironic twist.  The list is shrinking. Many of those to whom we send the cards do not mail holiday cards.  Surely we enjoy the cards we receive, but our receiving cards does not affect our sending the cards out.  We devote a whole day to the mailing, and as each name emerges, we have a minute to think about those people, bringing back memories that might not have emerged had we not sat there sending out our little gift.  Who is giving this present?  Who is receiving the gift?