With Christmas comes song...

It is important each year to have a deep and passionate love affair with a Christmas song.

Sounds provocative I know...

I typically blog once a year about the Sufjan Stevens Songs for Christmas.
I do this for a few reasons:

1) Its great
2) It happens to coincide with paper writing and frankly blogging beats paper writing and Christmas beats exams
3) I am not nearly interesting enough to maintain an original or new blog idea every day let alone year.
4) Its led to a personal tradition that I wish to inspire others toward

Each year, typically through Sufjan, I pick out a classic hymn, or song dedicated to Jesus' birth and make it the Christmas Song of the Year. I meditate, sing and enjoy the richness of its meaning and allow the music I hear every year one more chance to impact me.

Previous winners include:
2006 - Lo How a Rose Err Blooming
2007 - O Come O Come Emmanuel
2008 - Oh Holy Night

The best thing about this practice is that it slow but surely is building a compilation of Christmas songs that I have let touch my soul and continue to reach me each year.

This year I have gone away from the Sufjan list...
I present "It Came Upon a Midnight Clear"

It came upon the midnight clear,
That glorious song of old,
From angels bending near the earth,
To touch their harps of gold;
“Peace on the earth, good will to men,
From Heaven’s all gracious King.”
The world in solemn stillness lay,
To hear the angels sing.

Still through the cloven skies they come
With peaceful wings unfurled,
And still their heavenly music floats
O’er all the weary world;
Above its sad and lowly plains,
They bend on hovering wing,
And ever over its Babel sounds
The blessèd angels sing.

Yet with the woes of sin and strife
The world has suffered long;
Beneath the angel strain have rolled
Two thousand years of wrong;
And man, at war with man, hears not
The love-song which they bring;
O hush the noise, ye men of strife
And hear the angels sing.

And ye, beneath life’s crushing load,
Whose forms are bending low,
Who toil along the climbing way
With painful steps and slow,
Look now! for glad and golden hours
Come swiftly on the wing.
O rest beside the weary road,
And hear the angels sing!

For lo! the days are hastening on,
By prophet-bards foretold,
When with the ever circling years
Comes round the age of gold;
When peace shall over all the earth
Its ancient splendors fling,
And the whole world send back the song
Which now the angels sing.

There is a richness to Christmas hymns.

Patman the Rich