Christmas Carols: Still Popular and Beloved
12/25/08 10:58 PM
Eugene Byrne, is a British journalist, author and historian who gives us some good background on well known English carols. It might surprise you to know that the much loved, nostalgic and often emotion-producing carols that are sung during the Christmas Season, have only been in use about 200 years in the English-speaking world.
Carols fell into disuse after the Protestant Reformation in England because they were considered ‘frivolous.’ Carols were rarely sung in Anglican churches until the 1880's when Archbishop of Truro (and later Canterbury) E.W. Benson drew up the now-famous format for the Nine Scripture Lessons and Carols Service which has remained popular in England and in other countries where the Anglican or Episcopal Church is located.
Silent Night, Holy Night, all is calm, all is bright...(# 111)
Probably the world’s most popular and beloved carol comes in several different translations from the original German. It started out as a poem by a priest in Austria, Fr. Josef Mohr in 1816.
Two years later Fr. Mohr was at the parish of St. Nicola in Oberndorf when he asked the organist and local schoolmaster, Franz Gruber to put music to the words. One legend has it that the church organ had been damaged by mice but Gruber wrote it to be performed by two voices and a guitar; it was first sung at the Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve in 1818. It’s popularity was such that it has been translated into 300 languages and famously played a key role in the unofficial truce in the trenches in 1914 because it was the only carol that both British and German soldiers knew.
Once in Royal David’s City stood a lowly cattle shed...(# 102)
Cecil Frances Humphreys was a Irish Anglican from Dublin. In 1848 she published a hymn book for children, a book of verse explaining the Apostles’ Creed in simple terms which gave us several famous Episcopal hymns. So to the question on who made the world, the answer was that the children would sing “All things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small...” ( # 405).
The hymn she wrote, “Once in Royal David’s City stood a lowly cattle shed...” was the way children learned where Jesus was born. Children’s questions about death were answered with “There is a green hill far away, outside a city wall, where our dear Lord was crucified who died to save us all.” ( # 167).
Her book was a runaway ‘hit’ in Victorian England. “Once in Royal David’s City” was put to music by organist/composer Henry Gauntlett. Today, the hymn is used as the opening processional in the King’s College, Cambridge, Festival of Lessons and Carols, and in thousands of Episcopal and Anglican churches the world over, as well as being a popular carol for Christmas Eve Midnight Mass.