Tag: music

“It Came Upon the Midnight Clear” (Wikipedia/YouTube) is another grim carol from 19th-century America. It has that distinctively Unitarian sensibility of cosmic optimism tempered with awareness that people are typically terrible.

“I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day” (Wikipedia/YouTube) is a pretty song. No schmaltzy holiday tune, it reflects terrible darkness. You wouldn’t know it from most renditions, though, because they skip the dire middle verses. The version by Echosmith that I link to has the full lyrics in the comments, but they replace the dark bits in the performance with a jaunty instrumental transition.

Then from each black, accursed mouth
The cannon thundered in the South,
And with the sound
The carols drowned
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

It was as if an earthquake rent
The hearth-stones of a continent,
And made forlorn
The households born
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

“Fuck you if you don’t like Christmas” (YouTube) is a bit Not Safe For Work, but all the NSFWness is in the title. It makes you wonder whether you like that Panama is an isthmus, which is something I never even thought about having an opinion on before.

“We need different stuff in the economy now, things are changing. … You can’t just think of yourself. Just this one time, because it’s Christmas.”

Above all that, it hangs together. And it’s catchy.

“The Boar’s Head” (Wikipedia/YouTube) can be made very subtle and pretty, as in the arrangement I’ve linked to, but at bottom it’s a silly song. Written half in Latin doggerel, it begs to be belted out with gusto: “Let us servire cantico!“

My wife’s family had printed packets of sheet music, so singing carols always meant picking from the ones in the book. When she moved to Albany, we went on-line to look for sheet music. Sending links back and forth, we sang from our open laptops. This led to us discovering lots of great holiday songs, but The Boar’s Head is perhaps my favorite.

Blair Thornburgh isn’t far from the mark in calling it “Almost the absolute best carol ever written.”

Last year I started to write a post about my favorite holiday songs. I didn’t get past listing the titles of seven of them. Inspired by the book week thing, I’ve decided to make it seven posts this year.

I first heard “Fairytale of New York” (Wikipedia/YouTube) as a teenager, because my brother was a huge Pogues fan.It has some lovely musical juxtapositions while still being something you can sing-along to. I understand that it’s a huge thing in the UK, so much so that not hearing it is a challenge on the scale of Whammageddon.¹