Christmas lasts TWELVE DAYS when you're Catholic, dammit! *clings to convenient aspects of religion like any modern pseudo-Catholic*
I have a pathological hatred of Christmas music written after 1900. It’s twinned with my utter disdain for any attempt to drag religious music into the 20th or 21st centuries and it gets pretty unhealthy; I tend to go slightly insane when exposed to the Christmas radio station for longer than ten seconds.
You will note that none of the wassail songs are included here, as they have their origins in non-religious things and would therefore not qualify as Christmas carols per se. Don't get me wrong--I love them a lot. Especially the ones that get into thinly veiled extortion in the third verse or so. The Somerset Wassail is especially awesome.
Anyway, I was raised on the Vienna Boys’ Choir and medieval English carols, and I'm going to bloody well stay that way. I feel no shame in calling these carols really beautiful. When I talk about music being the thin and unbreakable link between me and religion, this is partially what I'm referring to. Here is a list of lovely things to bring you tidings of comfort and joy.
A La Nanita Nana
A Spanish song. When we were kids, especially if Doña Chencha was over, Grandpapa liked to play this on the guitar.
WHY DID THE CHEETAH GIRLS COVER THIS SONG? RAGE. ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED: RUINING RIET'S CHILDHOOD.
Es Hat Sich Halt Eröffnet
I have no idea what this is about. Something about gates opening and angels singing. It's Austrian. It's cheerful (surprise). It wins. This is the Vienna Boys Choir.
Patapan
This one is originally French, and urges children to pick up various musical instruments (hence pa-ta-pa-ta-pan for the drum and tu-re-lu-re-lu for the flute) and celebrate Christmas. I may just like it because of the fife. Oh well.
Riu Riu Chiu
The awesomeness of this Spanish carol is offset only slightly by its fiendishly difficult rhythm. Some arrangements are harder than others. For some reason we have a ridiculous one.
Still, Still, Still (weils Kindlein schlafen will)
Last Christmas morning, our dog turned out to have frozen to death in the neighbor's driveway. Not exactly the happiest of times, but damn it, we were going to play Christmas carols if it was the last thing we did. It was Tradition, and you don't run away from improperly capitalized words. As we'd already been through the standards ad nauseam, we turned to the endless fountain of Christmas music that my grandparents seem to have.
We sang this song. Only one person there spoke German, but we decided we had the right to be bigots about it.
So we took it down an octave, turned the gutturals up to eleven, and sang like we were going to straight up murder everyone if they didn't STFU so Jesus could sleep.
This is referred to as A Jolly Good Time in our family.
Sorry about the stupid picture.
(edit: I was going to link to a stereotypical German marching song, so as to give you a lulzy idea of our interpretation, but most of them are by white supremacist dickwads and I will not give their videos one more hit than is necessary.)
Gaudete
Huzzah for Latin carols!
Rejoice, rejoice! Christ is born from the Virgin Mary, rejoice!
Personent Hodie
Ahhhhh, this is what Catholicism should be like--grave, monumental, ancient, and completely unintelligible to the common man! (I jest! I jest! Well, only a little.)
Coventry Carol
I've always loved this song for its unearthly sorrow, but I learned a new history fact that makes it more interesting...
December 28 was the Feast of the Holy Innocents. King Herod supposedly got wind of the birth of a new King of the Jews from the wise men (awful wise of you, wise men) and ordered all young male children in Bethlehem to be cut into bits, effective immediately. The victims of this brilliant PR tactic are remembered as the first apocryphal martyrs.
Anyway, the most famous song about Herod's baby-killing spree is the Coventry Carol.
Herod the King in his raging
chargéd he hath this day
his men of might in his own sight
all young children to slay
It's named for a highly industrial city in England. On November 14, 1940, Coventry was the target of a Luftwaffe operation known as 'Moonlight Sonata'. Hundreds of people were killed and over a thousand were injured. If you want to read about the mutually awkward implications of broadly-targeted bombing, you can get your jollies here.
Anyway, I see interesting things in this song. It's about a cruel king ordering the deaths of civilians to cement his own power. Sound familiar?
I'll bet my nose that the Coventry Carol was sung quite often during Christmas 1940.
I'll be Home for Christmas
I actually hate this song a lot, so I'm not going to link to it, but something pretty hilarious just struck me...
I'll be home for Christmas, you can count on me.
Please have snow and mistletoe and presents on the tree.
Christmas Eve will find me where the love-light gleams.
I'll be home for Christmas if only in my dreams.
We know these things:
1. The song was written during the war, so it’s implied that the singer is in the service.
2. He won’t be home for Christmas.
3. On Christmas Eve, however, he’ll be “where the love-light gleams”.
4. He will dream about being home for Christmas.
I don’t know about you, but when I heard “love-light” I immediately thought of this:
…which transforms this into the least romantic Christmas carol ever.
To give him a little credit, he gets honesty points for telling his girl that he’s going holiday whoring, and that he’ll be home “if only in his dreams”, so he’ll regret it a little afterward.
Saved this one for last, because I didn't want to deal with it.
If you play Silent Night around me (and it’s not a commercial version that will just make me rage), I’ll be seeing ghosts by the second verse. They will be staring out of holes in the ground and squinting between twisted trees.
Silent Night is one of the few carols that are immensely popular in both the German and English languages. In several accounts (of both world wars), this song came drifting down the lines in both languages. In the very few locations where the (in)famous and much-mythologized Christmas Truce of 1914 took place, this song was there.
Not on my list of favorites, but maybe the one with the most emotional impact. Silent Night is not healthy for someone with a dangerously overactive imagination.
:D I found Vladimir Miller singing it! He's an AMAZING basso profundo. I was looking for a version with a male chorus and hadn't realized that St. Petersburg had done it.
That is all for today. Probably going to move to smaller posts from now on because these larger ones have a tendency to sit around unfinished for weeks as I hem and haw over their content. Blargh.
And may joy come to you
and to you your wassail too
and God send you a happy new year!
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