Saturday 5th December 2020: Reflection: Dorothy Williams

 HARK THE GLAD SOUND..........

 

A few years ago I spent the Christmas season in Morocco.  Very early on Christmas morning (about 4.30 a.m), we were taken on camels into the desert to view the sunrise over the Sahara.  This was quite an uplifting experience, but for me something was missing; there were no carols (  and indeed, why should there be under the circumstances?)

 

But this made me realise how much I look forward to carols, beginning in Advent.Their yearly repetition links me with my childhood and in a wider, and more profound, sense with mankind’s Christmastide celebrations, dating back through the centuries.

 

Indeed, we know that our pre-Christian ancestors marked the winter solstice with songs and dancing to alleviate the darkness and bleakness of the winter months; they saw hope in the evergreen of the holly and the ivy.  Did they perhaps gain an early glimpse of something more profound that was yet to come?

 

It seems fitting that these early celebrations became absorbed into the Christian tradition.  That is why I remember frosty Sunday mornings, when I was a child (Sundays were, of course, always frosty then) ,  when the Salvation Army Band went all  around my little town playing carols – even during the war.

 

But the carol had a  chequered path to follow.  In Tudor times, carols, and the dances associated with them, were an important part of Christmas merrymaking.  King Henry VIII himself wrote carols , such as “Green grows the holly.”  Protestantism was much stricter  about singing and Christmas festivities.  But the people did not abandon their favourite songs. (An interesting side-note here indicates that “O come all ye faithful” was probably used for political purposes by the Jacobins;    they used it to convey cryptic messages about the restoration of the Stuart dynasty in the person of Bonnie Prince Charlie).

 

During the eighteenth century the Church began to re-introduce decorations and songs into church, influenced by Charles Wesley and by the Baptist and Methodist movements.  In the nineteenth century further changes occurred, encouraged by Victoria and Albert and some of our newer, popular carols were written, such as “In the bleak midwinter” and “O little town of Bethlehem”.

 

It was in Truro, Cornwall, that the first service of nine lessons and carols took place, later replaced by the annual recital at Kings College, Cambridge.  (I couldn’t get that in the Sahara either, but I found the pope celebrating midnight mass).

 

If any justification for the role of the carol in our Christmas celebrations were needed,we  have only to consider  what happened in World War 1 in the trenches of the German and English troops.  We all know how the German soldiers sang “Silent Night ,Holy Night” and then hostilities ceased for a brief time. The poignancy of the occasion has been passed down to succeeding generations – a fitting tribute to the role played by a little carol in bringing light into the darkness, as it has done since time began.