My Favourite Christmas Carols - No 1

This has been my favourite carol for as long as I can remember, so it took no decision to choose it here.  I imagine I first liked it because of its opening imagery as I have always loved deep midwinter.  Other carols throw in the snow but this carol feels it. 

Then came my right-theology phase when every carol evoking snow was to be dismissed as nonsense - probably, as in this case, Victorian nonsense.  It was then that I realised that the poetry here is different - winter is not so much the pretty Christmas card type, it is the hard-as-iron type.  Snow is cold and therefore strangely dark. It therefore may be meteorologically inaccurate but it tells an accurate story in the same way that the Apostle describes Jesus being the Light born into the darkness.  Here he is hope being born into the dead winter death of the earth.

 

Later, in a verse almost invariably omitted (one suspects because of the shock factor of a breastful of milk - the truth is too much for us perhaps?), even the mythical ox, ass and camel are used primarily as a poetic device to highlight the awesome truth of the incarnation.

 

In the bleak mid-winter
Frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron,
Water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow,
Snow on snow,
In the bleak mid-winter
Long ago.

Our God, Heaven cannot hold Him
Nor earth sustain;
Heaven and earth shall flee away
When He comes to reign:
In the bleak mid-winter
A stable-place sufficed
The Lord God Almighty,
Jesus Christ.

Enough for Him, whom cherubim
Worship night and day,
A breastful of milk
And a mangerful of hay;
Enough for Him, whom angels
Fall down before,
The ox and ass and camel
Which adore.

Angels and archangels
May have gathered there,
Cherubim and seraphim
Thronged the air,
But only His mother
In her maiden bliss,
Worshipped the Beloved
With a kiss.

What can I give Him,
Poor as I am?
If I were a shepherd
I would bring a lamb,
If I were a wise man
I would do my part,
Yet what I can I give Him,
Give my heart.

 

Like nearly all great carols it draws the starkest contrast between the proper setting of the Son of God and his incarnate setting with us lot; the exchange of heaven's glory for a maiden mother's kiss.  And it ends by giving us the opportunity, which every Christmas offers, to voice that we will give the one present that such a Saviour deserves.  This simple version by the late Dan Fogelberg captures the poem quite beautifully I think:

 

 

Presumably its author Christina Rosetti never heard it sung for it was written as a poem.  She spent time away from her Highgate home in the country at Holmer Green, just up the road from Wycombe, and maybe it was there that she saw the snow and hard-as-iron winter landscape?  Anyway it is a nice thought that my favourite carol has some connection to the place I now live.

 

Have a Happy Christmas with your favourite Christmas carol, whatever it is!