Need Cheer? Sing Loud for All to Hear!

“Christmas” is a musical category unto itself. It’s in a bin like “Classical” or “Hip Hop” But within the Christmas bin is a mixed bag, from treacly to sublime. At its best, it glows.

I hope, my children, that our last lecture on The Feast has left you all hungry for the holiday. Speaking personally, I hope that this lecture today, which is on the music of the season, is followed by a walk back to your dorms, each of you with earbuds in place, the music pacing you across the snow-covered quad provided by . . . Vince Guaraldi, perhaps?

Continuing to speak personally, I will, if I may, share a story about my favorite-ever experience with caroling, which might speak to why Christmas music is sometimes the precise thing that is needed at a certain moment in time, and why it speaks in a universal tongue. I consider much of “Christmas” music, not the goofy tracks but the heartfelt sounds we hear on the more cultured side of the admittedly fine “Santa Baby,” to be spiritual rather than religious. “Christmas Time Is Here” is a melody that makes its lyric superfluous. It’s full meaning is conveyed in Mr. Guaraldi’s melody, is it not?

[A note, class: Any of you choosing the Madonna version of “Santa Baby” over the Eartha Kitt are invited to leave the lecture hall now, and may return without penalty for our next talk, which will be begin a two-part lecture, Part One I will call, “Tinseltown Takes on Christmas.” Part Two will busy itself with the backstory of “The Greatest Christmas Movie Ever Made.” I will leave that as a tease, for now, saying only: The film in question is not in rotation on the Hallmark Channel.]

Now, as some of you know, before I was an old professor I was a young and then middle-aged journalist. Ours is — was . . . is — a trade that seems in some disrepute today but which, when practiced properly, I will defend to the death. That’s off topic and perhaps political, so I hastily apologize. I do not choose to be cancelled by the College before I finish our series of Christmas lectures.

As you do not know — because why would you? — my first job in the journo line of work was with a small monthly magazine based in the so-called Upper Valley region of northwestern New Hampshire, hard by the Connecticut River, which doubles as the state’s border with equally Christmasy Vermont. The Upper Valley is a beautiful, cold, hilly realm — a lovely snow globe realm at Christmastime.

A married couple named the Penfields — Don and Abbie — owned the magazine and were trying to make a go of it. This was good news for a few young aspirant journalists. Abbie and Don’s staff was by necessity small and came cheap. It was also tasked with doing any and everything, so we neophytes learned on our feet.

I hasten to emphasize: Don and Abbie were hardly cheap people. Quite the opposite They were exceedingly good and uncommonly generous people. They were idealists beset by a standard bank balance and a hopeless dream of running a magazine.

We staffers all became close friends in the old house that housed our little operation on a street called Reservoir Road. I had the largest office I ever would have in the business, and in my capacious closet I kept my cross-country skis and, when working late, would sometimes go for a moonlight tour of Storrs Pond to clear my head. Beyond our standard working hours, which really had no parameters, I enjoyed extra-curricular time spent with my colleagues. Later during my Manhattan years, social gatherings of the workforce had official names as to intents and purposes — “offsites,” “junkets,” “corporate outings,” “office parties.” In New Hampshire, they were just fun get-togethers. One summer, our top editor, Sharon, invited a dozen of us — the art and circulation departments (two people) included — up to her family’s place in the mountain town of Whitefield where we canoed, grilled and talked of upcoming issues.

And at the winter solstice, Don and Abbie had everyone, including the two or three ad sales folks, out to their place in Lyme for a Christmas party. Don brewed a spectacular milk punch. There was very little talk of work, for once.

I remember the Christmas party as if it were yesterday. It has stayed with me more than any single college lecture I’d sat through in the previous four years — and there might be a lesson in that for you, children. Learn life, but live life, too.

Don and Abbie hosted us at their hilltop spread and, after the milk punch was drained, ushered us into the hay-filled cargo beds of their pickups. On a crisp and cold evening, they drove us into the snow-filled countryside. They knew precisely where older individuals who were called “shut-ins” were living in family farmhouses. I’m betting Abbie and Don did the grocery shopping and bill-paying for many of these folks.

On this night, we stopped here and there to sing, terribly, our short set of carols. A lone man or woman, or an old couple, would appear at the door. There were tears all ’round. Tears of all sorts, tears that that were happy or sad, joyful, thankful, spiritual, fearful or simply without specific reason. Tears unbidden, tears welcome.

I had always wondered when back at the office what — or who — might be out there beyond those hills beyond my windows. I had wondered that earlier, too, when daydreaming in class. I had never bothered to learn the answer during my time on the cloistered college campus that was my home only yesterday.

I wish I could remember what we staffers on the magazine sang. I distinctly remember one old man, older than I am now, mouthing the words to one of our hymns as he stood, somewhat shakily, on his icy front porch.

Now, finally, children: our transition.

That holy night of caroling in New Hampshire was a long, long way — lightyears in time and distance — from what the Romans had in mind with their Saturnalian soundtrack long, long ago. But surely not all Christmas music is either holy or soul-stirring and much of it wouldn’t have been out of place at Caesar’s Circus. Parties do entail tunes, and among parties, Saturnalia and its immediate offshoots were ancient history’s original Surrealist Ball.

Regarding, though, the later, religious Christmas: Hosannahs were sung in Christ’s praise in clandestine cave chapels very shortly after His death three decades of so after AD Year One. Then much of the chanting that filled ancient monasteries, and that has enjoyed a popular renaissance in our time, was in contemplation of Christ’s birth, sacrifice or resurrection. In the 13^th century, Saint Francis of Assisi’s staged Nativity scenes were graced by hymns and songs, and Jacopone da Todi produced some of the earliest carols, which celebrated the blessed birth in a sweet and gentle way that would inspire, then inform, a thousand well-matched lyrics: “Come and look upon her child nestling in the hay!/ See His fair arms open’d wide, on her lap to play/ . . . Little angels danced around,/ Danced and carols flung:/ Making verselets sweet and true,/ Still of love they sung.”

The word carol is from the Middle English carole, which means a joyous dance set to song. By the early 1400s, English composers were contributing. “In the cradle keep a knave child. That softly slept; she sat and sung, Lullay, lulla, balow,/ My bairn, sleep softly now” may be from the first English carol. Four centuries later, they gave us the Great British Carol Book, with such classics as “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” (with a melody by Mendelssohn), “Good King Wenceslas” (on a 16^th century canticle) and the words of “Joy to the World!”) music attributed to Handel.” The English translated an anonymous Latin hymn and found “O Come All Ye Faithful,” and turned the Frenchman Adolphe Charles Adam’s “Cantique de Noel,” which debuted in Paris at Midnight Mass in 1847, into “O Holy Night.”

An interlude, children:

We mentioned Handel in passing, and that’s unjust. George Frideric Handel’s oratorio “Messiah,” perhaps the world’s dominant Christmas work, was first offered at Easter. It was composed in just three weeks in 1741; in 1742 it premiered in Dublin, proved an immediate success and raised considerable money for charity. Later, the German-born English composer oversaw annual Easter performances in London to support the Foundling Hospital, of which he was a patron. Good on you, Handel; Dickens would have applauded.

Quite obviously, Christmas has a powerful pull, and eventually “Messiah” switched seasons from spring to Yuletide.

Now, children, we return to our survey:

In the United States, Phillips Brooks, an Episcopal minister, provided the words to “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” which was performed for the first time by the children of the Holy Trinity Sunday School in Philadelphia in 1868. Edmund H. Sears, a Unitarian minister in Massachusetts, wrote the lyrics to “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear.” And in 1857 a third minister, the Episcopalian John Henry Hopkins Jr., of New York, wrote the music and words to “We Three Kings of Orient Are.” All along the way, the master composers such as Handel, Michael Praetorius (c. 1570-1621), Heinrich Schutz (1585-1772) and Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) were writing Christmas scores that would prove eternal. The Russian Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s ballet score loosely inspired by the German E.T.A. Hoffmann’s 1816 The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, debuted in December 1892, in St. Petersburg, and today splits the December bill with Messiah on famous stages, and in school auditoriums, the world over.

While the bigger productions were intended for the concert hall or cathedral, and while pre-Reformation carols were mostly sung by a cleric with no accompaniment, beginning with the Lutheran chorale in the 16^th century, Christmas music became a shared experience. Even non-singers were encouraged to join in. Consider: Even I, a flagrant non-singer, a non-singer of repute who would not be allowed ever to sing in public, was, on that cold but warming night in the hillsides of northwestern New Hampshire in 1976, singing in public.

Interestingly, the carol’s voyage from the pews into the streets was in emulation of the Saturnalian tradition of getting out into the community, reestablishing bonds and sharing joy. Yet again it would be Irving to introduce the tradition to the U.S. in his Sketch Book: “Even the sound of the waits, rude as may be their minstrelsy, breaks upon the mid-watches of a winter night with the effect of perfect harmony. As I have been awakened by them in that still and solemn hour ‘when deep sleep falleth upon man,’ I have listened with a hushed delight, and, connecting them with the sacred and joyous occasion, have almost fancied them into another celestial choir, announcing peace and good will to mankind.”

The same author, later: “I had scarcely got into bed when a strain of music seemed to break forth in the air just below the window. I listened, and found it proceeded from a band, which I concluded to be the waits from some neighboring village. They went round the house, playing under the windows.

“I drew aside the curtains, to hear them more distinctly. The moonbeams fell through the upper part of the casement, partially lighting up the antiquated apartment. The sounds, as they receded, became more soft and aerial, and seemed to accord with the quiet and moonlight. I listened and listened — they became more and more tender and remote and, as they gradually died away, my head sank upon the pillow, and I fell asleep.”

Such sublime and soothing imagery was irresistible, and soon carolers were heard across America, and Irving had metamorphosed an R-rated production, the traditional wassailing of Twelfth Day Eve he had learned of during his great tours of Europe, into the New World’s PG.

The why and how of this is fun to review, as others have found.

The noted writer Bill McKibben, often and justly praised for his insightful books about the environment and more generally for his role as a sane, crusading conservationist, points out in his Hundred Dollar Holiday: As far away and long ago as the Norse lands and ancient Rome, and as recently as Colonial New England, the winter solstice blowout, be it Yule, Saturnalia or Christmas, was very much out of control — a rampant frat party of inebriation, licentiousness and even lawbreaking, with music (of a slurred sort) at the forefront, as much as backgrounding, in proto-incarnations of wassailing. McKibben writes, “Using only the list provided by Puritan minister Cotton Mather we find “Reveling, Dicing, Carding, Masking and all licentious liberty.”

Leaning on the works of a writer he considers, as I do, “the preeminent Christmas historian Stephen Nissenbaum,” who in his 80s is professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts and author of The Battle for Christmas, Salem Possessed and other works, McKibben continues: “Men dressed as women and women as men. Christmas caroling often meant bawdy songs; as Nissenbaum points out, there were vast numbers of illegitimate births in September and October, clear evidence of the Christmas debauch of the year before. On these shores Christmas and rowdiness have been connected from the start. One eighteenth-century British traveler reported attending a ball in Alexandria, Virginia, where the elegant company stayed all night, “got drunk and had a fight”; in the nineteenth century, great explosions and gunfire were popular frontier celebrations . . . The wild abandon of Christmastime led the Puritans to try and ban the celebration . . .

“[I]t wasn’t just the boisterousness of Christmas celebrations that increasingly annoyed the ‘better class’ of people through Christendom. As Nisssenbaum points out, the revelry had a particular character; this was the one moment of the year when people who still lived in great poverty turned the tables on their feudal masters who usually dominated their lives. The various lords were expected to offer the fruits of harvest to the peasants (i.e., to almost everyone), and the peasants were more than willing to show up and demand them. Thus began the tradition of wassailing — bands of boys and young men would walk into the halls of the rich to receive gifts of food, drink, even of money. It was a sort of wild trick-or-treat. One wassail song went like this: ‘We’ve come to claim our right . . ./ And if you don’t open your door, / we’ll lay you flat upon the floor.’ ”

Yikes.

So along came Irving, painting for America a picture of rosy-cheeked wassailers as innocent as 1979-vintage New Hampshire carolers working the shut-ins circuit, figuring, like Buddy the Elf later would, that the best way to spread Christmas cheer was to sing for all to hear. Irving rendered crazy, blitzed, thuggish wassail gangs as a “celestial choir, announcing peace and good will to mankind” with “minstrelsy [that] breaks upon the mid-watches of a winter night with the effect of perfect harmony. . . . They went round the house, playing under the windows. I drew aside the curtains, to hear them more distinctly. The moonbeams fell through the upper part of the casement, partially lighting up the antiquated apartment. The sounds, as they receded, became more soft and aerial, and seemed to accord with the quiet and moonlight.”

Don’t bother fact-checking. His is a factually unique account of wassailing.

Irving’s co-propagandists came marching. Fellow New Yorker Clement Clark Moore (with whom we will deal in a later lecture on Christmas lit), with his diabetically sugar-coated if inventive poem, “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” fueled the reformation movement, and for its posters Thomas Nast presented in Harper’s Weekly a portrait of jolly ol’ Santa as if done from life. These men accomplished what Cotton Mather and the Puritan Police Force hadn’t been able to: They tamed — by reframing — the American Christmas. Version 2.0 was able to grow far greater and quicker than the original, incorrigible holiday could ever.

Even as America, influenced by Irving, toned down wassailing, it turned up the volume. After Irving, Moore, Nast and Francis Church (“Yes, Virginia, There Is a Santa Claus”) had their say, the explosion of all things Christmas, particularly music, went strength to strength in the 20^th century. Christmas music came to feature singing cowboys, chipmunks and Elvis and Mariah making for a delightful if occasionally bemusing discography. Tin Pan Alley in New York City churned out more eternal Christmas standards in the 20^thcentury than all of Europe had since the Romans. Between 1940 and ‘41, a second “Irving” — Irving Berlin — wrote the best-selling Christmas song of all time, “White Christmas.”

Except for the most egregious novelties (see: “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer”), all of it is part of the noble tradition in which Christmas composers have sought to conjure heavenly or joyous or simply entertaining words and music, to invoke the mystery of a blessed night.

Now, then, children — before I bid you good night, two little stories as coda to today’s lecture. Please forgive me another time as I return to the personal in conclusion.

My longtime friend Glenn Wolff, who lives in Minnesota, is a fine artist who, you might know, children, provided the wondrous pictures in my two books concerning Christmas — the books that have led to my being invited here to deliver these lectures on the history of the holiday. The multitalented Glenn moonlights on standup bass with a Traverse City big band. He writes to me this very morning: “We just did a holiday concert, and it was a blast to play some old and new jazz charts. My favorites were a Count Basie arrangement of ‘Jingle Bells’ and a contemporary arrangement called, ‘God Rest Ye Merry Funkymen.’ ” I know Glenn’s opinions to be unerring and so, children, I forward his recommendations to you.

Lastly there is my wife’s tale. She tells me of a friend who tells of her daughter who, like our own children, grew up at home not only as an infant and little girl but through her rebellious high school years. And yet each morning in December when this headstrong girl was 14, 15 and 16 years old, she would yell from her bedroom to her mother who was trying to rouse her, “I’m NOT coming down until you put on SOME CHRISTMAS MUSIC!”

I, for one, side with the refractory youth.