THE OPERA singer Bryn Terfel sings with great restraint and feeling the gentle, soothing Welsh song “Ar Hyd y Nos,” or “All Through the Night,” often sung at Christmas time. This recording is with the Welsh National Opera Orchestra.
Ev’ry star in heaven is singing All through the night, Hear the glorious music ringing All through the night. Songs of sweet ethereal lightness Wrought in realms of peace and whiteness; See, the dark gives way to brightness All through the night.
Look, my love, the stars are smiling All through the night. Lighting, soothing and beguiling Earth’s sombre plight: So, when age brings grief and sorrow, From each other we can borrow Faith in our sublime tomorrow, All through the night.
THE real Trapp Family did not much resemble the Hollywood and Broadway version portrayed in the movie The Sound of Music except that the children loved to sing and Maria von Trapp did too.
The singing siblings were classically-trained vocalists who toured Europe and later the United States in the 40s and 50s. They sang folk songs, madrigals, sacred music and Christmas carols. They also ran one of the first cross-country skiing inns in America from their farm in Stowe, Vermont, still owned by the family. The family’s fortune had been mostly wiped out in a bank failure before World War II so their singing helped support them. They were trained and directed by a Catholic priest, Fr. Franz Wasner, who was nothing like his mercenary and cynical counterpart in the movie, Max Detweiler.
The Trapp Singers were never the sensation that their fictional counterparts were, but they were better singers and they helped preserved the folk music and sweet Christmas songs of their beloved homeland.
WHEN the Ghost of Christmas Past appears to the hard-hearted Ebenezer Scrooge on the night of Christmas Eve and takes him on a journey back in time, they revisit a party at the warehouse of Scrooge’s former employer, Mr. Fezziwig.
The scene has been played countless times in countless remakes and adaptations of Charles Dickens’ novella, A Christmas Carol. In these interpretations, Mr. Fezziwig, the merchant and money lender, remains fundamentally the same.
Let’s not forget that Christmas Carol is not primarily a tale about Christmas. It’s a story about the idolatry of money and how it transforms society.
Dickens understood that Capitalism was creating an inhuman society. Scrooge embodies an economy that is based first and foremost on the relentless pursuit of money for money’s sake — not for the sustenance of virtuous and happy families. He is a “a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint… secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster.”
Unsurprisingly, he is a bachelor, too hard-driving for his old sweetheart.
Fezziwig is his counterpart. He stands for economic sanity, a world of independent businesses and family-like commerce — independent of global conglomeration and centralized banking. Sadly, he is later forced to sell out. His former apprentice Scrooge and his equally grasping partner, Jacob Marley, eventually buy everything.
Mr. Fezziwig is light-hearted enough to dance with his employees. He is the paternal employer who treats his workers not as exchangeable commodities but extended family. His warehouse on Christmas Eve is transformed into a festive ballroom, with the good cheer and generosity of Mr. and Mrs. Fezziwig presiding over all. Mrs. Fezziwig is “one vast substantial smile.” When Fezziwig dances with her “a positive light appear[s] to issue” from his calves.
Mr. Fezziwig is everything Scrooge is not. Here is the scene from Stave Two of The Christmas Carol:
THE BEAUTIFUL Basque carol “Gabriel’s Message” is based on a hymn first sung some 900 years ago:
The medieval Basque hymn ‘Gabriel’s Message’ tells the story of the Annunciation in the context of Christmas. The worship of heaven and earth conjoin as the chorus repeats the connection between the Blessed Virgin Mary’s unique status as the Mother of God and the desire to honour and praise both her and God.
The Trinitarian presence of God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit is implied beneath the radiant surface of the hymn, in the core of the Annunciation and the impulse to worship. Time—both Chronos and Kairos—weave into playful conjoining throughout the hymn, which tells the story of the Annunciation in a linear way while promising the generations to come and looking to the forerunners of Christ’s arrival, particularly Isaiah. The hymn pierces the darkness with Gabriel’s flaming eyes and snowdrift wings, offering the Feast of the Annunciation as a Christmas promise, redolent with Advent imagery.
The carol is based on a c. 13th-century Latin hymn, Angelus ad Virginem, which probably has a Franciscan origin. Its popularity meant it travelled throughout Europe, and was known in Britain soon after it was written. Indeed, it’s quoted in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, as part of the Miller’s Tale when he mentions Nicholas the scholar singing it … More
Like many Christmas carols, this has gone through many transformations, has been rediscovered and cherished by different epochs, surviving through the change and upheaval of history.
“Gabriel’s Message” will never grow old. It will never become obsolete, however much it is changed, and that’s because the sublimity it expresses is eternal.
FROM English Folk-Carols by Cecil J. Sharp (The Wessex Press, 1911):
There is, perhaps, no branch of folk-music in the creation of which the unconscious art of the peasant is seen to greater advantage than the carol. For his peculiar and most characteristic qualities, mental and emotional, are precisely those which in this case are most needed — his passion for simple, direct statement, his dislike of ornament and of the tricks of circumlocution, his abhorrence of sentimentality, and above all his courage in using, without hesitation, the obvious and commonplace phrase, of words or music, when by its means the required expression can most easily be realized. What cultivated musician would dare to set to such words as “The Virgin Unspotted” the graceful, flowing, three-time melody given in this collection, even if he had the luck or skill to think of it? What, again, could be more concise in its diction or clearer in its meaning, than the last stanza in “King Herod and the Cock,” or more vivid than the following lines in “The New Year’s Carol:”
Then Christ He called Thomas And bid him: Come and see And put thy fingers in the wounds That are in my body; And be not faithless, but believe! And happy shalt thou be
which will, I venture to think, bear comparison with the parallel stanza of the Easter carol “Ye Sons and Daughters,” translated by Neale.
It is just his transparent sincerity, his freedom from affectation, self-consciousness and conventional restrictions, that makes the unlettered rustic pre-eminently fitted to translate into music and poetry the dramatic incidents of the Christ story. His simplicity disarms criticism; just as his pious, intense, child-like belief in every detail ot the Gospel narrative banishes skepticism. Nor did he trouble himself about the place of performance; village Church or village inn —it mattered not. A tune, so long as it expressed his feeling, harmonized with the sense and fitted the metre of the words, served his purpose wherever and whenever it was destined to be sung.
THE “Huron Carol,” sung here byHeather Dale in Wendat (Huron), French and English, was written in 1643 by St. Jean de Brébeuf, one of the eight North American Martyrs. This is said to be the first carol ever written in America. St. Jean, who was later captured by the Iroquois and tortured to death, adapted a 16th-century French folk song to his Jesous Ahatonnia (Jesus is Born). According to the early missionaries, the Hurons had a great devotion to Christmas once it was introduced and built Christmas chapels out of fir and cedar.
A much different version of the carol can be found here.Read More »
“THERE is surely something inexpressibly touching in this presence of the inferior animals at the nativity of the Incarnate Creator. In the Incarnation God has been pleased to go to what look like the uttermost limits of His divine condescension. He has assumed a material, although a rational, nature; and, according to our understanding, it would not have been seemly that He should have assumed an irrational nature. Nevertheless He is not unmindful of the inferior creatures. Their instincts are in some sort a communion with Him, often apparently of a more direct character than reason itself, and bordering on what would commonly be called the supernatural.
“At times there is something startling in the seeming proximity of the animal kingdom to God. Moreover all the inferior animals, with their families, shapes, colours, cries, manners, and peculiarities, represent ideas in the divine mind, and are partial disclosures of the beauty of God, like the foliage of trees, the gleaming of metals, the play of light in the clouds, the multifarious odours of wood and field, and the manifold sound of waters. Read More »
FBI crime statistics for 2012, the year of the alleged Sandy Hook Elementary massacre, show zero homicides for Newtown, Connecticut, where the school was located.
The FBI, in this case, is honest. They could not show homicides in Newtown for that date because the alleged massacre was a government propaganda drill that involved dozens of actors and other government staff for the purpose of terrorizing the public into accepting gun control legislation and tighter government security measures. Propaganda of this kind was legalized under the Obama Administration.
In the following video, First Selectman Patricia Llodra of Newtown states under oath that an electric sign that read, “Everyone Must Check In” was erected by the Department of Homeland Security near the school. Some say the sign appeared as early as Dec. 13th, the day before the alleged shooting.
“NO one’s body is polluted so as to endanger the soul if it has not pleased the mind. If you were to lift my hand to your idol and so make me offer against my will, I would still be guiltless in the sight of the true God, who judges according to the will.”
The story of St. Lucy’s life and martyrdom can be found here.
When the youth who had asked her hand in marriage heard of this, his love was changed into hatred, and he accused her to the Governor, Paschasius, as well for refusing to become his wife, as also for being a Christian and despising the gods. Paschasius called Lucy into his presence, and admonished her to sacrifice to the gods, as well as to keep her promise to the young nobleman. “Neither will be done,” replied the virgin; “I sacrifice only to the true God; to Him have I given my faith; not to any man.” “I obey the command of the Emperor,” replied Paschasius; “you must sacrifice to the gods, and keep your word.” “You obey the command of the Emperor,” said Lucy, “and I obey the command of God. You fear a mortal man, I fear an immortal God, and Him I will obey.”
She died in the year 303 AD after a sword was thrust into her throat.
With perhaps a few exceptions like the Amish and a small percentage of others, modern Americans have proven conclusively that they are not guilty of common sense.
Celebrities are NOT “sick people”. They may be stupid and they may do evil things. That does not make them “sick”. It makes them stupid or evil. Propositions like “celebrities are sick people” or “murderers are sick people” are moral judgments couched in the vocabulary of fake-medicine.
It is standard procedure nowadays to attempt to discredit people by calling them nasty-sounding names like “crazy”, “insane”, “mentally ill”, “mentally sick”, “psychopathic”, “psychotic”, and “sociopathic”. I contend that such name-calling is both a measure and a consequence of moral cowardice. It is as if breaking rules or laws were not itself sufficiently wrong or evil. I submit that all of that pseudo-medical vocabulary is nonsense, evasion, and theater. Read More »
