The Stories of Christmas

Idea 01 — the spine

How late did it arrive?

Every song on tonight's program, pinned to the year it was made and the year it became a Christmas song. The gap between those two marks is the whole story. Three of them are absurd.

First song of the pair The song that answers it Origin unknown Never settled

Idea 02 — where they came from

Eight countries and one low Earth orbit

Hardly anything on this program was written where you would guess. A Basque folk tune reached English through a Devon parsonage. A French atheist's poem came back as a Boston abolitionist's hymn. A thirteenth-century spring carol out of a Finnish schoolbook was given Christmas words in England six hundred years later. The dotted lines are those crossings.

Old World New World A crossing

Idea 03 — the pairs

Pair One — The Announcement

One song is the message arriving. The other is the person who received it, alone with it afterward. Nine centuries apart, and the page puts nothing between them.

The message arriving · Basque, traditional

The Angel Gabriel from Heaven Came

Birjina gaztettobat zegoen · English text by Sabine Baring-Gould

A Basque folk carol, carried into English in the late nineteenth century by a Devon parson, novelist and tireless collector of folk song — the same man who dashed off Onward, Christian Soldiers one Saturday night because the children needed something to sing on a long walk to church the following Tuesday.

He was genuinely strange and rather wonderful. Over a thousand publications. A pet bat he kept in a sock. As a young curate he fell in love with a sixteen-year-old mill girl named Grace Taylor, arranged for her education, and married her; they were together forty-eight years and had fifteen children. When she died he had Dimidium Animae Meae — "half my soul" — carved on her stone.

The story everyone tells is that at a children's party he picked up a small girl and asked whose child she was — and she burst into tears and said she was his.

The shape of the phrase — long, curving, and it resolves. Not a transcription.

The tune is why this carol survived when so many collected carols didn't. It moves in long curving lines that feel older than any hymnbook, and it comes to rest on most highly favoured lady — a phrase that lands differently depending on how you hear it. Blessing, or burden, or both.

the silence is the point

Alone with it afterward · 1992

Breath of Heaven (Mary's Song)

Chris Eaton · lyric reshaped and recorded by Amy Grant

The newest song on the program by a wide margin, and not a Christmas song in any conventional sense. There is no manger in it. No star, no shepherds, no angels — nothing you could put on a card.

It's a prayer, first person and present tense, spoken by a frightened teenager on a road she didn't choose.She is not celebrating. She is asking, in the middle of it, whether she was the right choice.

That is a rare thing in this repertoire. Christmas music is overwhelmingly written from the outside looking in — narrators describing a scene, congregations announcing news, travelers arriving. Almost nothing in the standard carol book is written from inside the experience, and the older tradition tends to hand Mary serenity rather than fear.

The same drawing, nine centuries later: it rises, and then it doesn't close.

Placed after the Gabriel carol, it becomes the other half of a conversation nine hundred years wide. The old song delivers the message from the outside, in long formal lines, and calls her most highly favoured. This one puts you in the room after the angel has gone — when the visitor has left, the announcement is over, and someone very young has to go on with the rest of it.

Idea 03 — the pairs, continued

Pair Two — The Journey

A town that has no idea what's about to happen, and the night it happens.

A town with no idea what's coming · 1868

O Little Town of Bethlehem

Phillips Brooks · tune by Lewis Redner

Brooks rode on horseback from Jerusalem to Bethlehem on Christmas Eve, 1865, and stood in the fields outside town. Three years later, back at his Philadelphia parish and needing something for the children to sing, he wrote this and handed it to his organist.

Redner then did nothing with it for weeks. By his own later account the tune arrived only on the Saturday night before it was due — he woke in the night with the melody in his head and scribbled it down half asleep, and always described it afterward as something whispered to him rather than something he wrote.

Choir directors may take what comfort they can from the fact that the most famous American Christmas tune was, on its author's telling, finished the night before the deadline.

St. Louis — Lewis Redner, 1868. The one in an American head.

If the melody tonight sounds different from the one in your head, that is because England and America never agreed. Same words, two entirely separate tunes, and each country is quietly certain its own is the real one.

What Brooks wrote is essentially a landscape. Dark streets, a silent sky, a town asleep and unaware. The drama happens entirely offstage.

The night it happens · 1847

O Holy Night

Placide Cappeau · music by Adolphe Adam · English by John Sullivan Dwight

Cappeau was a wine merchant in the small town of Roquemaure, a part-time poet, and by most accounts an avowed atheist with loudly anti-clerical opinions. The parish priest asked him for a Christmas text anyway, to mark a renovation at the church. He reportedly had to go back and reread the Gospel of Luke before he could write it, and produced the poem in December 1847 on a coach journey out of town.

Every word of this carol exists because of an accident that took a child's hand.

At eight years old, Cappeau was playing with a friend who was handling a gun. It went off, and Cappeau's hand had to be amputated. The other boy's father, in remorse, paid toward his schooling — which is the only reason a one-handed boy from a barrel-making family ended up studying literature and law at all.

The music came from Adolphe Adam, then best known for the ballet Giselle — which explains a great deal about why this song is so hard to sing. It was built for a soloist with room to move.

The English version is not a translation so much as a reworking, by John Sullivan Dwight, a Boston minister and abolitionist. The verse he is remembered for — chains breaking, the slave as brother, oppression ceasing — reads as something well beyond seasonal sentiment in an America of the 1850s.

An atheist

Placide Cappeau

wrote the words

A ballet composer

Adolphe Adam

wrote the music

An abolitionist

J. S. Dwight

wrote the English

So the most beloved sacred solo in the Christmas repertoire was written by an atheist, set by a ballet composer, and given its English words by a Boston abolitionist. None of the three would have described it as a devotional collaboration.

Two famous stories attach to this song: that it stopped the fighting on a battlefield during the Franco-Prussian War, and that it was the first piece of music ever broadcast over radio, in 1906. Both are best described as tradition rather than fact.

Idea 04 — one comma

The comma is in the wrong place

In almost every hymnal, and it changes the meaning of the whole line. Move it and see.

Drag the comma — or tap a gap

Charles Dickens knew exactly what he was doing when he put this carol in A Christmas Carol. A boy stoops at Scrooge's keyhole and sings it — a song about not being dismayed, at the least merry man in London — and Scrooge seizes a ruler and drives him off.

Idea 05 — the verses nobody sings

There is a crash in this song

James Lord Pierpont published it in 1857 as One Horse Open Sleigh, and it belongs to a vanished American pastime: young men racing one-horse sleighs down open streets in winter, with bells on the harness so pedestrians could hear them coming. Everyone knows the first verse. Almost nobody has read the other three.

Verse one — the one you know

Dashing through the snow In a one-horse open sleigh, O'er the fields we go, Laughing all the way; Bells on bobtail ring, Making spirits bright, What fun it is to ride and sing A sleighing song tonight!