Joyfully Singing

  Tonight and tomorrow are days for joy, and peace, I think. So instead of talking, I'm going to listen; instead of writing anything for you to think on, I think I'll just post a few lovely Christmas carols which I think any one of you, no matter your stance on Christmas will enjoy. So, here goes....                                                                                       I wish you all, Friends, Enemies, Good and Bad alike, A very merry Christmas.

    Bells give a sound that is very evocative. They are rung at both funerals and weddings. Bells can promote either sadness or joy. They either peel mournfully, or sound merrily.    One of my favorite Christmas carols, "Ding Dong Merrily on High,"  speaks of the bells which are rung in honor Christ's birth on Christmas day. I don't know if there are anything like bells in heaven, but if there were, the song suggests that they would have rung on that most joyous day, as also the sky was riven with angels singing. The song goes on to say that even so here on earth let the bells be rung and the people sing.  Finally, the writer urges the ringer to ready his chime, and the singer to beautify his rhyme.    If I am to be frank with you all I must admit I don't have anything else to say to you all today, but as you get ready for Christmas, do enjoy this joyful carol! Enjoy Christmas eve eve!

  What is the one thing that makes winter beautiful and fun, good people. The answer is contained in one word: Snow!    I believe I've mentioned before that Christ was probably not born in the bleak midwinter as the songs tell us, however, I think Winter a fitting metaphor to blend with Christ's birth. The air is cold, the ground is hard; all the world is a slate gray and a drab green, until the snow falls. One, dazzling white flake at a time, the bleak grayness is frosted over. Each misshapen branch is clothed in raiment which makes it beautiful. So too when Christ, falls upon our hearts. All our ugly, bare, misshapen sin, is covered over with His dazzling beauty. So it was also on that normal night, winter or no, in far away Bethlehem. All the world was sighing over the bleakness in which sin held it in an ever downward spiraling orbit, but when the virgin gave birth to a child and laid Him in a feeding trough, it was then that all the bleakness vanished, in the dazz...

   To say that the shepherds were frightened at the appearance of the angel is an understatement; they were terrified. I've often wondered what it was like, on that night for the shepherds, but I can be sure of one thing. When that angel first appeared it was heart stopping moment for everyone present.   It is interesting to note that in the scriptures, whenever angels spoke to men, they had the exact same greeting. "Do not be afraid." Angels are unworldly, fearsome creatures, unlike the "Raphaelite" image most of us have in our heads of beautfiul ladies smiling sweetly and playing softly on harps or lutes. Of course none of us can know for certain until we've seen one ourselves, but from all evidences, it seems that angels and fright go together.   The word angel literally means, "Messenger." Angels are God's announcers, they carry His dispatches from heaven to earth, and, perhaps, other places. The only other job we see angels perform...

    For centuries Holly has been considered the traditional foliage of Christmas along with ivy and mistletoe. I've always found the most fascinating thing about this plant being that it bears fruit in the winter. Bright Red berries, contrast with the green leaves and add a splash of color to the bare trees and gray, frozen ground.    Jesus was probably not born in the winter, but I like to think of His birth as similar to the contrast of the bright berries against a very dreary world. There had been four hundred years of silence in Israel  preceding the incarnation. No prophets, no word from the Lord, no miracles. Plus, the Romans had taken over the land and, if anything, the Jewish people might have felt abandoned by God.    But they weren't. It was at this bleak time in history, that God chose to send mankind the greatest gift He had ever bestowed; His only begotten son.   This, good people, is indeed cause for rejoicing, this is t...

       As a child, life is very black and white. High heels and earrings are sinful because your mother doesn't wear them, and all processed foods are disgusting because you don't eat them. When I was younger, I had a loudly proclaimed prejudice against any music that was written after the year 1850, and because of this, I wouldn't admit that any song written then was good. Why, because I didn't like rock 'n roll, blues, jazz, or country. Thus, I determined because these styles had gained popularity in recent years, I must not like any music written in recent years. Of course I  didn't realize that I was committing a serious, 'part to whole' fallacy, and would only listen to the old stuff. What I didn't realize, was that some of the songs I already liked, such as "How Great Thou Art," and "When Peace Like a River," were written in the modern era, plus I began to realize that I needed to broaden my horizons when I caught myself r...

   When I was younger I really didn't understand some of the words  to the carols very well. For example, in "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen," I thought that in the first verse, the angels were talking to the shepherds. "well," I consoled myself, "I can only hand it to the men of the middle ages to call shepherds merry gentlemen."    Of course this is not actually the case. The first verse is understood as a greeting, a salutation on Christmas day. Traditionally the song is believed to have been sung to the Gentry by the town watchmen on Christmas day; probably the first verse was meant as an apology to the nerves of 'growly' gentry who hadn't been woken up properly. As for who penned this ingenious piece of poetry, being that the first records of it come around the fifteenth century, it is rather hard to trace its author. The lyrics are considered to be the oldest of all "Olde" English carols and I like to think it was written by...

   I remember the time when Daddy introduced all of us to the English Christmas carol, "Once in Royal David's City."  He showed us a youtube video of the king's college choir singers at the start of the famous Christmas Eve, "Nine Lessons and Carols" which they have held each year since 1919. A lone boy chorister sings the first verse, then the rest of the choir joins on the second, the third verse is sung while the choir walks down the isle to their places, and the audience and organ come in on the fourth stanza. I remember getting lost in the beauty of the singing in that marvelous cathedral with all those majestic harmonies blending as one magnificent voice. It filled the whole place with grandeur; especially with the organ, so out of place in a modern building but seeming to be part of the cathedral studs. It raised my soul to the roof and for days I went around singing "Once in Royal David's City," not necessarily because I liked the son...

     I don't know how many of you were as nit-picky as I was, but you may understand how, as a child, I was very concerned about the fact that everyone thought there were three wisemen when such a fact is not explicitly stated in Scripture. I even went to the extent of changing the words in the carols when I sang them. It was, "We many Kings," or, in The First Noel, "And by the light of that same star, many wisemen came from country far." You get the picture.     I was also very particular about when the wisemen saw Jesus. It was not as a baby in a manger, but as a toddler in a house. When we used to set out nativity scenes, we wouldn't set out the wisemen, because they weren't supposed to be there yet.         We all have our own pet views on things, especially in cases like this where all the facts are not given. We don't have any reason to believe that the men were kings, this deduction is made because they could afford rich...

  When Elijah fled from the wrath of Queen Jezebel and hid in a cave, the Spirit of God came down to him; not in the storm, or in the whirlwind, but in the gentle breeze which followed. I used to be skeptical about the legitimacy of my conversion, because It wasn't dramatic or causing any really different feeling inside of me. However, the truth is, that God is in the ordinary; He created it. It is only our craving flesh which, like the Athenians, constantly wants something new, something extraordinary, something stimulating.   And yet, on that most glorious day, that day when all the angels watched in awe as the Creator came down and became a creation, it was really quite inconspicuous. On that day when, He made a greater sacrifice than any man could ever comprehend, hardly anybody noticed. In Egyptian myth, when Osiris the king and future savior of the world was born, all sorts of things happened and practically everyone knew about it, even a lowly woman fetching water fr...

I used to hate learning Latin as a grade-schooler. It ended up that we four older ones learned it in pairs; Gabrielle studied with Timothy, and Arianne learned the despised language with me. One of the jobs of the partnership was to drill the vocabulary flashcards with each other. The stack of words got pretty big, really fast and Arianne and I both dreaded these sessions. It was probably our own lack of enthusiasm which made it such a dole-some task, but none the less, we despised it. We must have been about nine and eleven, respectively, when, one day, as we were getting towards the end - usually we would take turns, one would drill the other and then switch - and it was my turn to translate and I was cross with Arianne because she was hurrying me along and making it quite clear that drilling her little sister in a dead language  was not something she had slated out for her ideal day. We were drilling from English to Latin, which tends to be a little harder than from Latin to ...

    Do you remember the days of your childhood? Do you remember when you looked forward to Christmas with unbounded eagerness? Your presents were made or bought with enthusiasm not to be outmatched and each one was lovingly swaddled in wrapping paper, done up in your own unique style half of it was paper, the other half was tape. Then came Christmas eve, the most wonderful day of the year, when, amidst the soft glow of many lights, you crept down right before bed, and lovingly arranged your little packages around the tree.         Then there's that other facet of Christmas that comes to your mind as well. You remember all the beautifully illustrated picture books retelling the Christmas tree, and how fresh and wonderful the story was to you each Christmas. You eagerly await the time when your mother puts the special Christmas story books, the ones that only come out at Christmas, in a basket under the tree, and you spend hours poring over the ...