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For several years after leaving the practice of law, I wrote a column on legal issues for McCall’s magazine. On occasion, I wrote articles for the magazine that were more fun. Christmas Carols Joseph Mohr, a twenty-six-year-old assistant pastor in the Austrian village of Oberndorf, had a problem. It was the day before Christmas 1818, and a mouse had chewed its way through the organ bellows at St. Nikola’s Church.That meant Mohr’s congregation would be without musical accompaniment for Christmas mass. Hoping to ease the blow, Mohr wrote words for a new song and gave them to Franz Gruber, the church organist, who set them to music for the guitar.That night, the church choir performed the new carol for the first time. In a matter of hours, and largely by chance, Joseph Mohr and Franz Gruber had written “Silent Night”—perhaps the best-known Christmas song of all time. Many Christmas carols have church origins. Others have come out of secular settings.But whatever their source,these carols transcend differences of people and place. Some of us enjoy Beethoven but don’t like Aaron Copland. Others appreciate Frank Sinatra but abhor the Rolling Stones. Virtually everyone loves the songs of Christmas.They are the music of our youth,reminding us of family and a time when life seemed simple and particularly joyful.Each year,we feel a comforting sense of community when we join with others to sing the familiar unchanging melodies. Many of our Christmas carols come from anonymous sources. Regarding “Deck the Halls,” we know only that it originated inWales in the 1500s, and that Mozart later borrowed the melody for a violin-andpiano sonata. Another traditional English song, “God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen,” achieved particular literary fame. According to Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, a caroler came to Ebenezer Scrooge’s door on Christmas Eve, put his mouth to the keyhole and began to sing: God bless you merry gentlemen! May nothing you dismay! 330 THOMAS HAUSER “At the first sound,” recounted Dickens,“Scrooge seized a ruler with such energy of action, that the singer fled in terror.” Words and music to “The First Noel” were printed in the 1800s, but the song is believed to have originated as a shepherd’s tune centuries earlier , possibly in France. Legend has it that, during the Christmas season when shepherds sang in the fields and mountains, angels would accompany them from on high by singing the chorus to “The First Noel.” But while some carols are anonymous in origin, the beginnings of others are well known. In 1865, Phillips Brooks, the thirty-year-old rector of Holy Trinity Church in Philadelphia, took a trip to the Holy Land during the Christmas season.Three years later, still inspired by what he’d seen, he wrote the words to “Little Town of Bethlehem” and gave them to his church organist, Lewis Redner, who set the words to music. Another equally popular Christmas carol was the work of two men born a century apart. CharlesWesley (a co-founder of Methodism) wrote the words to four thousand hymns.“Hark!The Herald Angels Sing,” published in 1739,was among them.A century later,Felix Mendelssohn composed an oratorio celebrating the four hundredth anniversary of Johann Gutenberg’s invention of the movable-type printing press. In 1855, eight years after Mendelssohn’s death,Wesley’s words were joined with the second choral movement from Mendelssohn’s work to give “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” its present form. “Joy to theWorld” is another product of different eras.The words are based on the Old Testament’s Psalm 98 and were written by an English theologian named Isaac Watts in 1719.The music was composed a century later. “Adeste Fideles” is the most popular Christmas carol sung in a single tongue worldwide.The music was written by John Reading in the 1600s. John Francis Wade composed the words in the eighteenth century in Latin. Since then,“Adeste Fideles” has been translated into more than 120 languages, including English (“Oh Come,AllYe Faithful”), but the Latin verses are still commonly sung. Unlike its European counterpart,American Christmas music is not particularly religious.“Jingle Bells,”written by James Pierpont of Boston in 1857, is a seasonal song that doesn’t even mention Christmas.Twentiethcentury songs such as “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town,” “Frosty the Snowman,” “Winter Wonderland,” and “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” are equally secular. REFLECTIONS 331...

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