Advent Day 20 - A Christmas carol
Where do you stand on Christmas carols? Do you feel beaten around the head by mid-December or are they a precious part of your end-of-year experience?
Last night I had one of those reminders that music at Christmas has a lot to answer for. I was preparing to drive out to get some pizza locally (yes I know it’s not the healthiest choice but needs must some evenings). In spite of my best intentions, I was transfixed on our driveway thanks to the approaching singing of some local children, surrounded by adults holding charity donation buckets. In the middle of it all was a Santa sleigh, containing a very large bearded Santa. It was time for Father Christmas to visit our village. The group took up their position under the large beech tree at the centre of the village that gets decorated with Christmas lights. It was all so unbearably wholesome and lovely – a reminder of childhood Christmases when my parents would get us out of bed to see the sleigh come down our road and you knew that Christmas was very close.
Christmas carols
They sang various carols, Hark the Herald Angels Sing, Once in Royal David’s City, Oh come all ye Faithful… It was beautiful and moving.
All of which contrasts strongly with the very same carols being piped into stores using some strange arrangement. Having worked in shops in the run-up to Christmas as a student, I remember the feeling of creeping insanity when the same music went around for the fifth time. It wasn’t joyful the first time and it certainly wasn’t getting any easier on the fifth listening. I guess the context is everything. If I hear carols sung in a church, the tears rise behind my eyelids within seconds. And Carols from King’s, which I had no time for in my teens, is now a pleasure. I think it matters where, and how, you hear the same music.
1980s discos
Being a teenager in the 80’s my memories are of Christmas discos filled with the pulsing beat of Wham’s Last Christmas or the even more insistent Merry Christmas Everybody by Slade from several years earlier. It’s interesting that both of those tracks have stood the test of time, and you’ll hear them everywhere you go in the next few weeks.
Some songs that came out before Christmas made a huge impression. For some reason Culture Club’s Victims stands out in my mind. I bought the single (it’s probably still in the attic somewhere) and it instantly evokes 1983 for me. We had just moved house to a new area, I was making new friends and enjoying what I was studying at school. It wasn’t the Christmas Number One (in the UK that honour went to The Flying Pickets in a song I’ve since erased from my memory). But the following year saw Band Aid’s Do They Know It’s Christmas. This was quite rightly a monster hit that was brought out to help raise money for famine relief in Ethiopia. Definitely a Christmas song worth remembering and the original version remains the iconic one.
But the drumroll of honour surely has to go to The Pogues’ Fairytale of New York from 1987, which forces everyone stop what they are doing and to mouth as many words as they can remember after one too many drinks in the pub. It has a raw quality in the vocals thanks to Shane MacGowan and Kirsty MacColl’s amazing voices and they bring a Celtic edge to the song as a whole. It sums up Christmas and still feels as good as when it was first released.
Happy Advent!