Advent

Come, Child, into our hearts and still the storm

made by our selfish wishes wrestling there

and weave again the fabric of mankind

Out of Thy Light, Thy Life, Thy loving Fire.

So writes Adam Bittleston in his Meditative Prayers for Today. As the frenzy of spend, spend, spend catapults us towards yet another corporate capitalist, materialist Christmas, we might, perhaps, reflect on those words "weave again the fabric of mankind".

Advent is a good time to reflect on the technology of the Machine Age, with its mass production of foods, clothing, entertainment, music, art, news and artificial sparkles. It is all too easy to find oneself wondering what on earth it is all about.

A book entitled "Christmas Melodies: Carols, Hymns, Songs" (Price 3/6d) recently caught my attention. It carries a Foreword by the popular conductor Sir Malcolm Sargent (1895 - 1967). He writes:

"IT IS ONE of the interesting and thrilling pleasures of the musician to realise that music is not only for the "professional" and for the "concert hall" but, that it has a willing duty to fulfil to the amateur and the home.

"Certain festivities demand their appropriate music and on occasion the dullest and least demonstrative of us feel an urge to burst into song.

"This is especially true at Christmas time, when Christmas Carols and Songs do more to create and maintain the spirit of Christmas than anything else."

It would seem that most of the Christmas hymns that we sing today in churches were composed in the nineteenth century with a church congregation in mind. However, most of the Christmas carols and songs are traditional, part of the folk music in general. Almost all the carols were written between 1400 and 1647, as the Middle Ages, the era of the Catholic (ie Universal) social order, was drawing towards its end, and the Protestant Revolution loomed large. In 1647 the Puritan regime banned the singing of carols.

Nevertheless, traditional carols and songs survived. According to the Christmas Melodies book, The Holly and the Ivy is described as

"a remarkable mingling of the pagan and the Christian. Holly and ivy are primitive symbols for male and female and the poem probably derives from a fertility dance. "The rising of the sun" almost certainly relates to pagan religion. The existing words date back at least to the 1300s; the carol probably comes from Gloucestershire or Somerset."

Also included in the Christmas Melodies are: Away in a Manger, Silent Night and The Coventry Carol, classed as carols (originally composed by lay people), Hark the Herald Angels, classed as a hymn, and Jingle Bells, classed as a Christmas song.

Like all traditional folk songs and nursery rhymes, Christmas songs were not sung from hymn books. The verses had to be learned by heart at mother's knee. It is in the ages old, multi-tasking household that traditional stories can be told, and notions of value, justice, right and wrong, good

and evil, can be passed on from generation to generation.

When families come together to share time during the twelve Days of Christmas, home cooked food is often the central feature of the celebrations. Carols are not as commonly sung today, perhaps because our electronic devices attract our attention, perhaps because we have never had the time, inclination or opportunity to learn the verses by heart.

In days gone by, winter was a time when the household was very much thrown back on its own resources. Long nights and low temperatures forced people to batten down the hatches and share time together musing over the meaning of life, death and the universe, of "love, peace, justice and human dignity", as in the verses of the Christmas songs and carols. Today, as the household is increasingly invaded by the nebulous network of the World Wide Web, it may be time to look again at the reasons for the various traditional Christmas festivities.

The next Blog will look at the Partridge in a Pear Tree.