Mark and Val’s annual Christmas show

Sure, it’s early, but it’s the only Sunday we’re on in December 🙂

This year’s Christmas show focuses on some of Valerie’s favorite songs and themes. She offers you her two favorite carols: Sing We Noel Once More (Noel Nouvelet), a traditional French carol dating from the late 15th century in a 1950s choral version (somebody please pick this up and record a Trad version for her!!) and the Boar’s Head Carol; plus carols that have not completely strayed from their pagan roots; both house visiting and orchard wassails; carols with particularly charming lyrics, including the ‘Huron Carol’ which she says is the darndest piece of Christmas music she’s ever heard; and a set of counting carols.

The show’s heavy on the British tradition, but tucked in are a few spirituals, a bit of Americana, some songs in French & Gaelic, the prologue from Hamlet, and, since both Advent and Hanukkah are in full swing, a couple of Hanukkah songs.

If we were to do all the exposition she’d like about the songs chosen and why she’s chosen them, we’d lose half the music, so, instead, here in no particular order, are some things you might find interesting to know about Sunday’s music:

The original carols, first sung in Europe thousands of years ago, were pagan songs sung at the Winter Solstice celebrations as people danced round stone circles. Carols used to be written and sung during all four seasons, but only the tradition of singing them at Christmas has really survived. Early Christians took over the pagan solstice celebrations for Christmas and gave people Christian songs to sing instead of pagan ones, all written and sung in Latin. Since most people couldn’t understand Latin, by the time of the Middles Ages (the 1200s), most people had lost interest in celebrating Christmas altogether.

This was changed by St. Francis of Assisi when, in 1223, he started his Nativity Plays in Italy. The people in the plays sang songs or ‘canticles’ that told the story during the plays. Sometimes, the choruses of these new carols were in Latin; but normally they were all in a language that the people watching the play could understand and join in. The new carols spread to France, Spain, Germany, and other European countries. The earliest written carol of this type dates from 1410. Sadly, only a very small fragment of it still exists.

When Oliver Cromwell and the Puritans (a seriously cheerless bunch) came to power in England in 1647, the celebration of Christmas and singing carols was stopped. However, the carols survived as people still sang them in secret. Carols remained mainly unsung in public until Victorian times, when two men called William Sandys and Davis Gilbert collected lots of old Christmas music from villages in England.

Through all of this, a pagan thread continued…

You’ll hear a ‘holly and ivy’ set. Holly, ivy and other greenery such as mistletoe were originally used in pre-Christian times to help celebrate the Winter Solstice Festival, to ward off evil spirits and to celebrate new growth. In pagan times, holly was thought to be a male plant and ivy a female plant. An old tradition from the Midlands of England says that whatever one was brought into the house first over winter, tells you whether the man or woman of the house would rule that year! But it was unlucky to bring either into a house before Christmas Eve.

When Christianity came into Western Europe, some people wanted to keep the greenery, and give it Christian meanings but also to ban the use of it to decorate homes. The UK and Germany were the main countries to keep the use of the greenery as decorations. Here are the revised Christian meanings: The prickly leaves of the holly represent the crown of thorns that Jesus wore when he was crucified. Its berries are the drops of blood that were shed by Jesus because of the thorns.  Ivy has to cling to something to support itself as it grows. This reminds us that we need to cling to God for support in our lives. Pretty clever, eh?

Speaking of pre-Christian origins, we can’t forget that the Vikings raided and settled in the British Isles and were a primary influence from 800 until the battle of Hastings in 1066.

One of Valerie’s two favorite carols, the Boar’s Head Carol, a macaronic (mixing the vernacular with Latin) carol first published in 1521, talks about a feast during midwinter in which a wild boar was served as the main dish with its head was placed separately on a platter to symbolize bravery and abundance. Closely related to the Norse tradition of a boar sacrificed to Freyja during the feast of the Winter Solstice, this song originated from an urban legend in Queen’s College, Oxford back in the 16th century which tells of how a scholar from Queen’s college managed to kill an attacking board and offered it at dinner.

By the way: Queen’s College, Oxford, England still celebrates the tradition: three chefs’ bring a boar’s head into the hall, in procession with a solo singer who sings the first verse, accompanied by torch bearers and followed by a choir. The procession stops during verses and walks during the chorus. The head is placed on the high table, and the Provost distributes the herbs to the choir and the orange from the Boar’s mouth to the solo singer.

Public caroling (which itself pretty much faded with the advent of television) pretty much replaced the original practice of wassailing.

Wassailing is another British tradition with Norse roots. The word wassail itself is from the Old Norse “ves heil”, Old English was hál, literally: be hale) and refers to a beverage of hot mulled cider, drunk traditionally as an integral part of wassailing, a Medieval Christmastide English drinking ritual intended to ensure a good cider apple harvest.  The tradition of wassailing falls into two categories: house-visiting wassails and orchard-visiting wassails. The house-visiting wassail is the practice of people going door-to-door, singing and offering a drink from the wassail bowl in exchange for gifts. The orchard-visiting wassail refers to the ancient custom of visiting orchards in cider-producing regions of England, reciting incantations and singing to the trees to promote a good harvest for the coming year.

Finally, apropos of nothing, the Huron Carol (or Twas in the Moon of Wintertime) is Canada’s oldest Christmas song, written in about 1642 by Jean de Brebeuf, a Jesuit missionary at Saint-Marie among the Hurons in Canada in the native language if the Huron/Wyandot people. The English lyrics were written in 1926 by Jesse Edgar Middeton, and use a traditional Algonquian name, Gitchi Manitou, for the ‘Great Spirit’, which is not in the original Wyandot version.

By the way: Did you know that approximately half of the 30 best-selling Christmas songs by ASCAP members in 2015 were written by Jewish composers? Jewish composers gave us Winter Wonderland, Do You Hear What I hear?, Silver Bells, Sleigh Ride, and White Christmas, just to name a few. You’ll be hearing Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas written by Ralph Blane and performed by the Bittersweet Christmas Band, plus two Hanukkah songs: Happy Joyous Hanuka (Hanukkah) and Light One Candle.

 

 


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